Court Is Asked to Throw Out Peyer Conviction : Appeal: Attorney for ex-CHP officer found guilty of murder claims misconduct by prosecutor and errors by judge.

An attorney for Craig Peyer argued before a state appellate court Tuesday that his first-degree murder conviction should be overturned on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct and judicial errors during the trial.

In a 30-minute session before the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego, attorney Christopher J. Schatz said prosecutor Paul Pfingst unfairly influenced the jury by portraying Peyer as a “predator” in his closing arguments.

Furthermore, then-Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman erred by allowing Pfingst to paint this “psychological profile” of Peyer, Schatz said.

Peyer, a 13-year officer for the California Highway Patrol before he was fired, was convicted June 22, 1988 of killing Cara Knott, 20, on the night of Dec. 27, 1986 near the Mercy Road off-ramp from Interstate 15. His first trial ended in a hung jury in February 1988. He was the first CHP officer convicted of murder while on duty and is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence.

The appellate court, after listening to the arguments Tuesday, is expected to rule within 90 days.

Schatz’s oral arguments echoed a lengthy appeal that he filed with the court last July. He noted that Peyer, 40, was convicted largely on circumstantial evidence, and argued that the prosecution’s case hinged on “an ideology of character disorder” used to describe Peyer as a predator who liked to stop young women on the darkened freeway off-ramp and detain them for long periods.

A major contention in Schatz’s argument was Huffman’s decision to allow 31 young women to testify about being stopped by Peyer on the same off-ramp where Knott was strangled and thrown off a bridge. None of the other stops ended in violence, and the women testified that Peyer never touched them or asked them for a date.

The women’s testimony was prejudicial to Peyer’s defense and was admitted into evidence without any legal basis, Schatz said.

During the trial, Huffman told jurors they could consider evidence about the previous stops only to infer the possible identity of the killer and not to reach conclusions about Peyer’s character.

Schatz argued that the previous stops did not constitute a modus operandi by Peyer, but instead were used unfairly by Pfingst to show a “character trait of stopping women” that led to Knott’s murder.

Pfingst was encouraged to characterize Peyer as a predator in his closing argument by Huffman’s failure to enforce the instructions about the traffic stops he had previously given the jury, Schatz added.

“The prosecution didn’t have a great deal of evidence of what occurred there (at the murder scene),” said Schatz in an effort to stress the shortage of physical evidence in the case.

However, Deputy Atty. General Janelle Davis, who argued for the prosecution, said that Huffman acted correctly by allowing the young women to testify about the nighttime stops. The stops showed substantial similarities between Peyer’s prior conduct and the killing, Davis argued.

“Peyer regularly and frequently . . . had a pattern of stopping young women on the Mercy Road off-ramp and taking them down (below the freeway),” Davis said.

She added that Huffman was very explicit in his instructions to the jury over how to interpret the stops.

“Despite what the defense says on appeal, the jury was told repeatedly . . . it doesn’t show he’s a bad person or murderer but only to show that Peyer could have stopped Knott,” said Davis.

Schatz also argued that Pfingst unfairly told jurors that Peyer’s “appetite (for young women) was growing,” implying that Peyer was predisposed to murder. It was an error by Pfingst and by Huffman for allowing the jury to hear that unfair characterization of Peyer, Schatz said.

But Davis countered that any description of Peyer by the prosecution resulted from a zealous advocacy and “was a proper argument to characterize the evidence.” “Any possible error” committed by Pfingst and Huffman in this regard was “harmless,” she added.

Schatz also tried to argue that Peyer should have been granted a change of venue because of massive pretrial publicity. But Justice Howard B. Wiener, one of three justices to hear the arguments, quickly pointed out that Peyer’s trial attorney, Robert Grimes, said that that he did not favor a change of venue.

Schatz said Grimes did not understand the extent of the “contamination” of potential jurors by the pretrial publicity. He added that Grimes, a prominent San Diego defense attorney, also failed to adequately contest Huffman’s rulings, which allowed prosecutors to paint Peyer in an unfavorable light and put the 31 young women on the witness stand.