SINCE HIS murder retrial began a month ago, Phil Spector has heard himself described as a gun-obsessed boor with a mouth filthier than a truck-stop restroom and mood swings as sharp and scary as a dagger, writes HARRIET RYANin Los Angeles
Surprisingly, this portrait came courtesy not of prosecutors - although they've offered their own unflattering character sketch - but from the music producer's own lawyer.
In a strategic change from his first trial, which ended in a hung jury last year, the defence has acknowledged abusive, dangerous and unstable behaviour by Spector and even provided jurors with details of such episodes.
The approach, his lawyer says, is the only way to combat what the defence considers the most damning evidence against Spector in the fatal 2003 shooting of actor Lana Clarkson: the testimony of five women who say he terrorised them with guns under similar circumstances.
"The alternative is allowing the jury to believe Mr Spector hates women and women only," his lawyer, Doron Weinberg, told a judge in November.
Questioning prosecution witnesses, Mr Weinberg has seized on instances in which Spector drew weapons on men or carried firearms in the course of his daily life.
He asked Dorothy Melvin, who alleges that Spector pistol-whipped her when they were dating in the early 1990s, to recount a time when the producer pulled a revolver on a group of young men who mistook him for actor Dudley Moore.
Spector (67) faces a minimum of 18 years in prison if convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Ms Clarkson.
Ms Clarkson (40) was shot to death in the foyer of his suburban Los Angeles mansion three hours after they met. Spector's defence contends she took her own life.
Prosecutors maintain that Spector pulled the trigger when she expressed a desire to leave the home. The theory is based in part on the experiences of the five women over the past three decades. The prosecution argues that the incidents show a pattern that culminated in Ms Clarkson's murder. In each account, the women were alone with Spector when he had been drinking. When they expressed a desire to go home - or, in one case, refused to enter his hotel room - he responded by pulling a gun, the women claim.
Spector's defence has implied that some of the women's accounts were exaggerated either to sell their stories to the media or because Ms Clarkson's death coloured their memories. But his lawyer has drawn on their knowledge of Spector to present him as an equal-opportunity offender who lived within a "Hollywood culture" that considered firearm brandishing, self-indulgent rages and rants to be as normal and harmless as an expensive dinner.
Prosecutors questioned Ms Melvin about two Christmas parties at which Spector pulled guns and was forced to leave. Another witness, a retired police officer, said that as he departed one party, Spector repeatedly used an obscene word to refer to women and said "they all deserve a bullet in their . . . head".
The defence brought out additional information that Spector's target was not a woman but a man who he felt was being rude. Ms Melvin also said that Spector was invited back a third year, but she made sure to frisk him and take the weapon before he entered.
Outside the courtroom, Mr Weinberg said he hoped the jury would appreciate an "honest" picture of Spector. "The expletives and the gun-waving are like . . . exclamation points . . . but not intended to do harm," he said. "The point is, he has never fired a gun at a living being."
Legal experts who followed Spector's first trial closely said providing jurors with negative information about Spector was risky.
"The jurors' common sense is going to tell them that the more somebody waves around a gun, the better the chance it's going to go off," said Jean Rosenbluth, a law professor at the University of Southern California.- (LA Times-Washington Post service)