‘Factual Innocence’ Ruling Is Appealed

A prosecutor asked an appellate court Monday to overturn a judge’s finding that a Sylmar woman acquitted of her husband’s murder was “factually innocent” of the crime.

Jeanie Louise Adair, 40, had been accused of bludgeoning her husband to death in their Sylmar home in 1996. After a 1999 trial, a San Fernando jury found the widow not guilty, and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt declared that “no reasonable cause exists to believe that Jeanie Adair committed the crime of murder.”

The unusual ruling, in which Wiatt ordered all court records sealed, outraged prosecutors, who appealed.

“There is a feeling in the D.A.’s office that . . . our honor has been impugned, so to speak,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick Moran said after Monday’s oral arguments. Wiatt’s ruling, Moran added, “implied that we went after someone who was factually innocent, and it sends the wrong message to the public.”

Adair’s trial attorney, Richard Plotin, has said in the past that the widow simply wanted to “clear her name.”

On Nov. 5, 1996, Adair’s husband, Robert, was found beaten to death in the Sylmar condominium he shared with his wife and two children. During Adair’s trial, prosecutors unsuccessfully argued that the defendant, who had been having an affair with a doctor, killed her husband to collect $400,000 in life insurance.

But jurors sided with Adair, who told police that a man dressed as a gas company worker stormed into the condo, tied her up to rob her and then killed her husband when he walked in on the attack.

Her defense suggested that the doctor’s jealous ex-wife had staged the attack.

On Dec. 10, 1999, Wiatt found Adair to be factually innocent, saying his decision was based on an “independent review of the evidence . . . including a consideration of the credibility of all witnesses who have testified.”

No blood of the victim was found on the defendant, Wiatt said. Other evidence that corroborated the widow’s tale included a witness who saw a man in a gas company uniform in the Adairs’ condo complex near the time of the crime.

The judge also believed the injuries sustained by Jeanie Adair during the alleged attack could not have been self-inflicted, and that she had no motive to kill her husband.

But in an appellate brief, Moran wrote, “Jeanie Adair’s actions, both before and after her trial, are inconsistent with innocence. The discrepancies in Adair’s stories and her failure to explain those discrepancies imply a consciousness of guilt.”

John Steinberg, also representing Adair, argued that Adair gave inconsistent accounts to police because her head injuries from the attack made her disoriented and confused.