Ex-Officer Loses Bid for New Trial : Courts: Judge finds no juror misconduct in murder conviction of Robert Von Villas five years ago.

Finding that jurors had not been unfairly prejudiced against a former Los Angeles police officer when they convicted him of murder five years ago, a Van Nuys Superior Court judge Thursday denied the former officer’s bid for a new trial.

After four days of hearings in which three of the jurors who convicted Robert Von Villas were questioned, Judge Darlene E. Schempp concluded that while one of the juror’s recollections of details of the case cannot be believed, there was no misconduct that should warrant a new trial.

Von Villas’ attorney, Jack Stone, said the ruling would be appealed.

Von Villas and Richard Ford, a former police detective who served with him at the LAPD Devonshire Division, were convicted in separate trials in 1988 of the first-degree murder of Thomas Weed. Prosecutors said the two officers were hired by the victim’s ex-wife in 1983 to commit the killing for $20,000. They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Von Villas appealed his conviction, claiming there was juror misconduct, and the 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered Schempp to conduct a hearing into the allegation.

The hearing began last week and centered on what three jurors knew about Von Villas and Ford that was not part of trial evidence and when they knew it.

Stone sought to show that misconduct had occurred because one juror, Betty Cornick, had seen an account of Ford’s conviction in a newspaper while the Von Villas trial was still under way. Though Cornick testified that she put the newspaper down after inadvertently seeing the headline, Stone argued that it was likely she had read the whole story. He also said that on the day that story was published, Schempp had asked jurors if any had seen news accounts concerning the case and Cornick did not speak up.

Stone also argued that two other jurors, Kathryn Brown and Marge Kitchen, had a conversation during the trial in which Von Villas’ prior conviction for a jewelry robbery was brought up. Brown testified earlier that the conversation was during the guilt phase of the trial--before Von Villas’ prior conviction was introduced--and jurors should not have known of it. Kitchen, however, testified that she thought the brief conversation was later, during the penalty phase when the prior conviction was already part of the evidence.

Regardless, Stone told Schempp, “I think there is no question that we have shown misconduct in the case” by jurors.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Greg Denton told Schempp there was no misconduct. He said the case was highly publicized and an inadvertent miscue such as Cornick’s was unavoidable. He said the conversation between the two other jurors was not cause for a new trial because it was unclear when it had taken place. He noted that in the five years since the verdict, Brown had given four different possible dates for the conversation.

Schempp agreed, calling Cornick’s mistake innocent and saying that she believed Kitchen’s version of when the conversation took place with Brown. On Brown’s testimony, the judge said, “I find her totally unbelievable.”