Adair Wins Declaration of Innocence

Flatly refuting prosecutors’ continued assertions that a Frazier Park woman killed her husband with a baseball bat--and got away with it--a judge Friday declared her factually innocent.

The extremely rare ruling by Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt effectively erases the arrest of Jeanie Louise Adair, 39, who was acquitted of the Sylmar killing by a jury two months ago.

“Considering everything, the court finds that there’s no reasonable cause to believe that Jeanie Adair committed the offense,” Wiatt ruled, ordering her arrest records to be sealed and destroyed within three years and other records to be marked “exonerated.”

“This is the second-best Christmas present I’ve had this year,” Adair, who did not attend the hearing because she had the flu, said through her lawyer, Richard Plotin. “He did the right thing, thank God.”

Outside court, the victim’s mother called the decision a travesty and the lead prosecutor in the case said the judge was simply wrong, adding that he will recommend to his superiors that the decision be appealed.

“She’s guilty until the day she dies,” said Margarita Ruffino-Sutcliffe, Robert Adair’s mother. “I think the judge has made a mockery of my son’s murder.”

The prosecutor said he believes Plotin filed the motion in preparation to sue the county for malicious prosecution, but Plotin and Adair have both said the only reason for the motion is to clear her name and allow her to move forward with her life.

“It’s as if she had never been arrested, as if she’d never gone through this nightmare,” Plotin said. “It stops the public from saying she got away with murder.”

Wiatt said Friday that his independent review of the evidence presented at trial, at a preliminary hearing and during some pretrial hearings showed him that Adair had no motive to kill her husband.

He also said that blood evidence exonerated her and that her story of a brutal attack by a home-invasion robber dressed in a gas company uniform was corroborated by her injuries and by a witness who saw someone in just such a uniform in the neighborhood the day of the crime.

“[Wiatt] used the wrong legal standard, and this whole proceeding was done in the absence of the defendant,” complained Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein, who had asked to call Adair as a witness for the hearing.

Goldstein has for months accused the judge of gutting the prosecution’s case in retribution for the successful appeal of a pretrial ruling. He said Wiatt’s ruling Friday was “utterly inconsistent” with an earlier decision, based on almost all of the evidence before him now, that there was enough evidence of guilt to allow the case to go to a jury.

Legal experts and criminal-defense lawyers said a ruling of factual innocence is rare, in part because the law requires a standard far beyond that required for an acquittal.

“Most criminal defendants are satisfied to be found not guilty and don’t want to push it further,” said Erwin Chermerinsky, a USC law professor. “In most cases, there’s enough evidence that a judge is going to be unwilling to grant it.”

Criminal defense lawyer Harland Braun said he has been successful in such requests almost solely in cases that were dismissed before trial and where the police or prosecutors agree that the defendant should be exonerated.

He and others said Friday’s ruling would not preclude Robert Adair’s family from filing a civil wrongful-death lawsuit, something his mother said Friday she is still considering.

Robert Adair, 40, had discovered his wife was having an affair with her orthopedic surgeon and decided to leave her and move to Las Vegas, taking the couple’s two children with him, Goldstein maintains.

That and $400,000 in life insurance, he says, motivated Adair to crush her husband’s skull with a wooden baseball bat in November 1996. He dismisses as fiction her explanation of a home-invasion robber beating, robbing, binding and gagging her, then killing Robert Adair when he came home during the attack.

During the trial, Goldstein offered as proof of her guilt Jeanie Adair’s inconsistent statements about the details of the attack and two alleged phone calls to her lover and her husband’s work at a time when she had said she was tied up.

Plotin had told jurors that Melinda “Mindy” Shapiro, former wife of Encino surgeon Michael Shapiro, set up the attack on Jeanie Adair through a mob-connected friend out of jealousy and rage over the affair. He pointed to the lack of the victim’s blood on the defendant and the sighting of someone in a gas company uniform matching the description given by Adair as proof of her innocence.

Plotin said he is building a case against the real killer, which he intends to present to the attorney general for prosecution. Goldstein said in court that police are conducting an investigation of their own, with Adair as the target, although he would not elaborate on what crime she is now suspected of committing.

Prosecutors are precluded by law from ever again charging her criminally in her husband’s death.

Several jurors told The Times that, while they found Adair not guilty, that should not be misinterpreted to mean they agreed she was innocent. They said they acquitted because they found the police investigation disorganized at best and said they simply were never offered any hard evidence on which to convict.

“The way we felt in that room, we felt she possibly could have done it,” said Joe Flannigan, the jury foreman and for a while the lone holdout for guilt.

He said he was stunned at Wiatt’s declaration of innocence. “I think he’s dead wrong and he’s doing it out of spite.”