Verdict Upset in Shooting That Paralyzed Girlfriend : Crime: Member of a prominent Long Beach family will get a new trial. An appeals court rules his defense was incompetent.

Citing an incompetent defense, a state appeals panel has ordered a new trial for Bradley Ackerman, a member of a prominent Long Beach family who is serving a life sentence for shooting his girlfriend in the back and paralyzing her three years ago.

In an unusual ruling, the state Court of Appeal overturned Ackerman’s conviction of attempted first-degree murder, concluding that his attorney had failed to properly present the defense case that Ackerman had overdosed on Valium and didn’t know what he was doing when he shot Julie Alban while she was sleeping in her bedroom June 8, 1988.

The ruling was made Friday, but disclosed by attorneys in the case on Monday.

“Reversals of conviction are extremely rare on these grounds,” said Dennis A. Fischer, the attorney who handled Ackerman’s appeal. He added that Ackerman will remain in state prison until he is returned to the Los Angeles County Jail for a new trial. A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office said prosecutors would decide whether to appeal the ruling after reviewing it.

With new evidence about Ackerman’s physical state at the time of the shooting, his attorneys are hoping not for an outright acquittal, but for a conviction on a lesser charge, one that will carry a less severe penalty than the life sentence the 26-year-old is now serving at the California Men’s Colony near San Luis Obispo. “We’re not claiming he’s innocent. . . . He’s obviously guilty of something. It was conceded at the trial that he was guilty of at least assault with a firearm,” Fischer said.

During the trial, Ackerman was portrayed by his attorneys as a failed junior tennis champion and compulsive gambler who inadvertently shot Alban--the daughter of a well-known Long Beach surgeon--after consuming more than 20 Valium pills and two bottles of beer in a suicide attempt.

But defense attorney Anthony Murray never presented any scientific evidence about Ackerman’s Valium intoxication because he had been incorrectly advised by a psychiatrist in the case that it was impossible to test Ackerman’s blood samples for the drug because they had been mixed together.

After the trial, Murray discovered that he had been given incorrect information, and made a motion for a new trial, which was denied.

When Fischer took over the case, he filed an appeal, arguing successfully that such testing was possible and that the results might have persuaded the jury to render a different verdict.

The court agreed. “Had the jury heard the missing evidence of Valium ingestion, and accepted the Valium ‘defense,’ it could have returned any one of several lesser verdicts,” the ruling said. “We are sadly aware of the pain and cost of a retrial in this case. Our review of the record tells us what happened here paralyzed a young woman for life and the trial itself was a bitter struggle between former friends. Our duty, however, in this and every case is to insure the trial was fair. . . . This one was not.”

“Obviously there’s a sense of relief,” said Frani Ridder, Ackerman’s mother and the wife of Daniel H. Ridder, the chairman emeritus of the Long Beach-based Press-Telegram. “We felt he had not been fairly represented in our hearts.”

The shooting ended the friendship of the Albans and Ridders, two prominent Long Beach families who still live across the street from each other, and left Alban in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down by the young man she had once considered marrying.

“I feel terribly always for Julie,” Frani Ridder said Monday.

Alban, now 25, has enrolled in law school and is active in raising money for wheelchair athletic events. She and her family could not be reached for comment Monday evening.