Judge Purges Records of Wife Cleared of Murder

Flatly refuting prosecutors’ continued assertions that a woman killed her husband in Sylmar 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 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 in a San Fernando court, 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 said through her lawyer, Richard Plotin. “He did the right thing, thank God.” She did not attend the hearing because she had the flu.

Prosecutors said they believe Adair, even after jury acquittal, sought the judge’s ruling in preparation to sue the county for malicious prosecution. But Plotin and Adair have said the only reason for their motion for her to be declared factually innocent was to clear her name and allow her to move forward with her life.

Outside court, the victim’s mother called the decision a travesty and the lead prosecutor in the case said that he will recommend to his superiors that Friday’s 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.”

Wiatt said Friday that his independent review of the evidence presented at trial, a preliminary hearing and during some pretrial hearings showed him that Adair, who now lives in Frazier Park in Kern County, 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 Sylmar 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, who has for months accused the judge of gutting the prosecution’s case in retribution for successfully appealing a pretrial ruling, said Wiatt’s ruling Friday was utterly inconsistent with an earlier decision, based on almost the same 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 Chemerinsky, 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 in which the police or prosecutors agreed 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 that his wife was having an affair with her orthopedic surgeon and decided to leave Jeanie Adair and move to Las Vegas, taking the couple’s two children with him, Goldstein maintains.

That and $400,000 in life insurance, he claims, are what motivated Jeanie 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 Jeanie Adair’s inconsistent statements about the details of the attack and two alleged phone calls to her lover and her husband’s workplace at a time when she 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.

In the end, jurors criticized the police investigation as disorganized at best and said they were never offered any hard evidence on which to convict. Several jurors also said they suspected that Adair may have been involved and that their verdict should not be interpreted to mean that they agreed she was innocent.

“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 a guilty verdict.

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.”