Evidence Tests Were Bungled, Defense Says

Defense lawyers for a couple charged with a double murder at Universal CityWalk accused police of sloppiness and blundering Friday, saying crime-scene workers missed some evidence and mixed up some blood samples they did collect.

In closing arguments, prosecutors earlier argued that spite and debt aggravated by child-support payments motivated Paul Carasi and Donna Lee to fatally stab his mother and the mother of his child at a covered parking lot after treating them to a Mother’s Day dinner.

“They murdered those people,” Deputy Dist. Atty. John Gilligan said, referring to Carasi and Lee. “The problem is, they found out that murder is a dangerous business.”

Paul Carasi was covered in blood when he called police May 14, 1995, saying he and the women had been attacked by robbers.

Moments later, the California Highway Patrol received an emergency call from a box on the Hollywood Freeway where Donna Lee also claimed she had been attacked by robbers, who slashed her abdomen.

Prosecutors said she had locked herself out of her car as she tossed the murder weapon, a purse and bloody fanny packs belonging to Salinas and the Carasis and a sweater covered in Lee’s blood, down the embankment. Lee’s blood was also found at the parking lot where the crime was committed.

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Gilligan said the blood evidence alone was enough to prove the couple slaughtered the women and should be sentenced to death, “but there is so much more.”

But Ralph Courtney, Paul Carasi’s public defender, said his client got blood all over himself when he tried to help his bleeding mother and ex-girlfriend after the real attackers left.

He told the jurors that the investigation was “bungled and unreliable” because the law enforcement officers didn’t collect all the blood from the scene, then forced the evidence to fit their theory of the crime.

Courtney told jurors they’ll never know whether the blood on a railing, car-door handle and child’s car seat belonged to a third party who committed the murders, because it was not collected. He also said no blood collected from the victims was used in court, because it was contaminated by a plastic sheet placed on the bodies.

“Is this the kind of systematic scientific investigation that you will trust? I don’t think you can,” said Courtney, who called only one witness to defend his client.

He accused investigators and medical examiners of filling in the blanks under pressure to close the investigation.

He and Henry J. Hall, Lee’s defense lawyer, both also attacked individual pieces of evidence as having more than one possible explanation.

Hall said the strongest physical evidence against his client--her blood on Salinas’ shoe, and Doris Carasi’s blood on her jeans--is unreliable because the samples were switched.

As proof, he projected portions of the trial transcripts onto a screen, using a laptop computer, and showed that the blood stains received by the lab technician for testing either appeared or were preserved differently from the crime-scene technician’s description on the stand.

“There is no credible evidence to link Donna Lee to the place were Doris Carasi and Sonia Salinas were killed,” Hall said. “The evidence in this case, if you look at it, proves her innocence. She is wrongfully accused and you, you people, your consciences, your judgment are what she is now relying on to vindicate her.”

He told jurors that more of Lee’s blood would have been found at the scene, more of the victims’ blood would have been found on her and she would have suffered defensive wounds on her hands had she been hurt during a struggle with Salinas over the knife.

What really happened, he said, is that Lee was stood up by her co-defendant and as she sat in her car in the Universal CityWalk parking lot, she was stabbed by someone and drove away, just as she told the jury during her testimony days earlier.

Hall claimed the attack caused Lee so much stress that she cannot recall it. During the trial, he called on a mental health expert who testified that such memory loss is possible.

He has also tried to present his client as a sympathetic character, a lifelong victim of domestic abuse who was abused again by Paul Carasi and now the system that has wrongfully prosecuted her. During his closing argument, he repeatedly cited phrases from a letter Lee wrote saying she “should be used to being used by the men in [her] life” and that her past is “too painful” to talk about.

“There’s an old Indian proverb about walking a mile in my moccasins before you judge me,” Hall said. “So when you go back and evaluate Donna Lee’s testimony, you evaluate it in light of walking a mile in her moccasins.”

Gilligan called Lee’s amnesia a common jailhouse ploy to save herself and said even the defense witness testified that self-preservation is usually the cause of such memory loss.

“She wants to remember things that help her, that are neutral, but she doesn’t want to remember the things that hurt her,” he said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Stirling dismissed Hall’s accusation of switched blood samples, saying they were clearly marked and photographed.

“It’s common to have minor, trivial errors” in memory by a technician who is testifying about hundreds of samples she had taken 2 1/2 years earlier, Stirling said.

Jurors are expected to begin deliberation in Santa Monica Superior Court on Monday.