Ramirez Defense Urges Jurors to Use Reason

A lawyer for accused Night Stalker Richard Ramirez urged jurors Monday to “get over the blood and gore” and to exercise reason as they begin deliberating his client’s guilt or innocence.

“Mr. Ramirez has the right . . . to require the people, the government, to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and moral certainty,” attorney Ray G. Clark told the panel as the defense began its closing arguments in the six-month-long serial murder trial.

Clark conceded that the 13 murders, mutilations, burglaries and assorted sex crimes of which Ramirez stands accused did occur and that the “heinousness” of the crimes may be “worse than” the bloodshed in Beirut or Beijing. But he said prosecutors have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Ramirez committed the murders.

Clark also urged the jury of seven women and five men to consider the evidence--or the lack of it, in his words--and not to be swayed by their passions, as had other Americans in the past. The lawyer cited the Salem witch hunts and the mass internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor as two examples.

“We are looking for the truth here. And truth has no emotional content,” he said.

The defense attorney is expected to finish his arguments today, to be followed by the final remarks of the lead prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Halpin.

Then, after instructions from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael A. Tynan, jurors will commence deliberations, possibly before the end of this week.

‘Necessarily Tainted’

Clark told jurors that nearly all the in-court identifications of Ramirez were “necessarily tainted” because all but one of those witnesses had seen--and were influenced by--pictures of the defendant that were widely disseminated by the media.

The attorney struck a folksy manner, interspersing his critique of the prosecution evidence with cautionary tales of what he characterized as prosecutorial zealotry.

During the course of 3 1/2 hours of remarks, Clark invoked Abraham Lincoln, Sacco and Vanzetti, Wa tergate, Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other topics.

Later in the day, the defense lawyer began discussing some of the 15 alleged Night Stalker incidents. The first case involved the murder of an elderly Glassell Park woman in late June, 1984, in which two Ramirez fingerprints were found on a window screen that had been removed from the woman’s apartment window.

But Clark said that evidence did not amount to proof that Ramirez had killed the woman, since none of his prints were found inside the ransacked home.

‘Not a Choirboy’

Clark readily acknowledged that his client, a 29-year-old drifter from El Paso, Tex., is a burglar, adding: “Mr. Ramirez is not a choirboy.”

“You may have a strong suspicion” that Ramirez had been in the woman’s apartment, Clark said, but that would be “grossly insufficient for a conviction of murder.”

Clark also noted that some of the victims were shot to death while others were beaten, stabbed or strangled.

“There is no pattern here,” he said.

Halpin and his co-prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Yochelson, have sought to show that numerous similarities at the 15 crime scenes all point to Ramirez as the Night Stalker. Among them were distinctive shoe prints found at seven of the crime scenes.

Shoes Never Found

The shoes, an Avia Aerobics model, have never been found, a fact that Clark took great pains to discuss.

During trial, prosecutors had offered evidence to link Ramirez to the shoes by showing that both a Ramirez palm print and Avia shoe prints were found at a Monrovia home that was the scene of an apparent burglary, an incident that is not among the 15 incidents with which Ramirez is charged.

“This is a pair of shoes being ‘given’ to Mr. Ramirez,” Clark said. “Nobody ever saw him with them.”

Clark also reminded jurors that one surviving witness, a Burbank woman who said she was robbed, raped and sodomized by Ramirez, had told police afterward that Ramirez had straight white teeth. In fact, Clark said, Ramirez’s teeth at the time of his arrest three months later were “in abominable condition.”

The woman was one of eight prosecution witnesses, including six surviving women victims, to place Ramirez at the scene of one of a so-called Night Stalker attack.

The woman’s mistake, Clark said, “is the kind of mistake that raises reasonable doubt; grave reasonable doubt.”