BACKGROUND

Randy Kraft’s trial wasn’t Robert Peters’ first experience with a murder case. In 1988, the UC Irvine English professor helped clear an El Toro man of first-degree murder charges. In that case, prosecutors had charged 22-year-old Christopher Lane Johnson in the stabbing death of a gay man he said had made a pass at him in Laguna Beach. Prosecutors built their case for premeditated murder on poems seized from Johnson’s home. In them, he had written extensively about using his Buck knife to hurt someone. “They were poems about killing and death--the things that young people write about,” Peters said recently. Johnson’s attorney, Michael A. Horan, conceded his client had stabbed Derek Bowen but argued that Johnson was drunk or on drugs at the time and had not intended to kill Bowen. Peters said the defense attorney asked him to testify that writing about violence does not indicate a predisposition to commit crimes. “I find the idea of going hunting for a gay man to be loathsome,” said Peters, 67, who is gay. “But I also resent the idea that suggests the writer is what the writer writes about.” In his testimony, Peters read from his own works about violence, as well as from those of Homer, Shakespeare and Robert Frost--none of whom was known to be violent himself. The jury convicted Johnson of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, which Horan said may have been due to Peters’ testimony. “I had a point to make,” said Peters, “and I thought the courtroom was a useful forum.”