Local News in Brief : Retrial Ordered in Strangling of Thousand Oaks Woman
A Thousand Oaks man whose murder conviction was reversed on procedural grounds by a state Court of Appeal panel will be retried in the 1982 strangulation of a 24-year-old woman, a Ventura County Superior Court judge has ordered.
Judge Steven Perren on Tuesday ordered that the new trial of Michael S. Nottingham, 27, begin June 9. Nottingham was convicted of first-degree murder in April, 1983, in the killing of Margie Jane Davidson. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Prosecutors say the Thousand Oaks woman was killed in a remote area of the Santa Rosa Valley after she resisted a rape attempt by Nottingham, then an outpatient of Camarillo State Hospital. Nottingham, a former auto shop employee, denied the rape attempt and slaying.
An appeal court panel ruled last September that two previous sex offenses should not have been admitted as evidence and that jurors should have been told that a specific intent to kill Davidson had to be shown for a conviction of murder with special circumstances.
Nottingham is in Ventura County Jail awaiting trial.
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