The normally subdued and ’safe’ community of Faria Beach, near Santa Barbara, was turned asunder when residents, Brock and Davina Husted, were brutally murdered in their home May 20, 2009.  Since Davina Husted was pregnant at the time, it is considered a triple homicide.  According to the Los Angeles Times, “the slayings occurred after the Husteds’ 9-year-old son, watching TV, saw a man in a black motorcycle helmet come through an open door from the family’s seaside terrace into their living room.  The boy told investigators he saw the man confront his mother, who was six months’ pregnant, in the kitchen.  His parents died in another room as he and his 11-year-old sister fled to a neighbor’s home.”  The murderer’s motive remains unknown. Several months later in September 2009, 20-year-old security guard Joshua Graham Packer was arrested on suspicion of armed robbery at a Santa Barbara gas station.  He submitted to DNA testing which, after cross-referencing the information via criminal databases, led to a match from DNA discovered at the Husted’s residence. This revelation was possible thanks to the 2004 passing of Proposition 69, which mandated DNA samples from convicted felons be entered into an FBI tracking system. Last year, Read More …

I recently had a piece run in the Daily Journal, California’s largest legal news publication, on the 9th Circuit Probate Court’s decision in the Anna Nicole Smith case.  Below is the piece which ran on April 9, 2010. After 15 years of wasteful litigation and real-life soap opera, the case of Marshall v. Marshall appears to finally be over. On March 19, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas probate court as the court of record, which ruled that J. Howard Marshall II provided for Anna Nicole Smith while he was alive and his will clearly left his estate to his youngest son, E. Pierce Marshall. This marked the end of a long and winding road of legal treachery on the part of the lawyers handling Anna Nicole’s estate. This case has already taken a tumultuous path of appeals and has dragged on to become one of the most over litigated cases in probate history. The case has traveled from Texas to California and all the way up to the Supreme Court and back again. Smith’s attorneys have indicated their intentions to continue with appeals. The first strategy in the playbook will be to file for an Read More …