VISTA — For two weeks, jurors heard a Carlsbad mother’s story of a dysfunctional marriage, abuse by her schoolteacher husband, and the fear she felt right before she shot him to death in their bedroom.
On Wednesday, after two days of deliberating, the Vista jury found Julie Harper, 41, not guilty of first-degree murder and deadlocked on lesser charges — an outcome that outraged the victim’s friends and at least one juror who said she was convinced Harper was lying.
Harper had faced 50 years to life in prison if convicted of the maximum charge in the 2012 death of her 39-year-old husband, Jason.
The judge declared a mistrial after jurors hung 9-3 in favor of not guilty of second-degree murder, and 7-5 in favor of manslaughter.
Harper — who showed little reaction to the verdict — testified that her husband had raped her and verbally abused her for years and that she shot him as he moved toward her in a rage during an argument. Prosecutors disputed that story and said she had decided to kill him.
Deputy District Attorney Keith Watanabe declined to comment after the verdict, citing the potential for a retrial.
Harper’s attorney, Paul Pfingst, said the verdict should put the case to rest.
“To be really clear here, nine jurors determined that there was not a (second-degree) murder,” Pfingst said. “And there was a major split on the two remaining counts — to show that it’s likely this case could never be decided by a jury.”
One of the jurors said after court Wednesday that she hoped a future jury would convict Harper.
“I was completely 100 percent convinced of first-degree murder,” said April Penning, who was Juror No. 4. “I don’t believe she was abused.”
She said she was the sole holdout for a conviction on that charge, but acquiesed in the hopes the panel would convict on second-degree murder.
The Women on the Jury did not buy her story
Penning said other jurors believed that Harper had been abused, and that she fired the gun by accident. She said the jury of eight men and four women was primarily split on gender lines, with men more sympathetic to the defendant.
Jason Harper was a math teacher and volleyball coach at Carlsbad High School. Julie Harper, who once worked as a real estate agent, had been a stay-at-home mother in recent years.
Their marriage took center stage at the trial, with the defense presenting Julie Harper’s secret cellphone video recordings of two discussions in which the husband questioned his wife over money.
Dead men cannot defend themselves
“The betrayal of (Jason Harper’s) character by the suspect was unfair and inaccurate,” friend and fellow coach Andy Tomkinson said. He described Jason Harper as “gentle, calm, and above all, a really, really good father.” Three of Jason Harper’s friends said Wednesday they were shocked by the verdict.
The public has been brainwashed by the mass media
The verdict comes as recent news events have shone a spotlight on domestic violence, most notably the publication of a video showing NFL player Ray Rice punch his then-girlfriend in an elevator. And on Tuesday, the wife of Bell Gardens mayor fatally shot her husband and told police it was to keep him from brutally beating their son.
Casey Gwinn, former San Diego city attorney and a widely known domestic violence victim advocate, said verdicts such as Harper’s may be due in part to greater awareness about domestic violence.
Gwinn founded the first Family Justice Center in the city in 2002 to prevent family violence. His National Family Justice Center Alliance has helped leaders open more than 80 similar centers around the nation.
“There’s a sensitivity now to juries and the public to battered women syndrome and the dynamics that occur when a person gets to the point where the person feels there’s not any other choice but to pick up a weapon,” Gwinn said Wednesday from Milwaukee, where he was helping open another center.
“I think it’s historically very difficult for people to understand how verbal and emotional abuse can put you in fear for your life,” he added.
Harper’s trial tactics were not based on a true battered woman syndrome defense, which typically involves a long history of abuse, and ends with the woman killing the man when she is not in immediate danger, such as when he is sleeping.
This case was more about self-defense in the immediate moment, with testimony of abuse oftentimes flitting around the edges.
“You are allowed to use force to repel force if you believe your life is in imminent danger,” said Gretchen von Helms, a criminal defense attorney not associated with this case.
Von Helms said such a defense can still be messy for jurors.
“In self-defense cases you’re admitting I did something wrong but have to say I’m justified and did it under the law and here’s why.”
Julie Harper testified last week that she shot her husband as he came at her during a struggle — she said he was enraged and had tried to sexually assault her, which she said he had done more than two dozen times over more than two years. A few days before the shooting, she said, she had started sleeping with a gun under her pillow.
Watanabe argued that Harper’s testimony was not true, and that she had been deteriorating mentally and emotionally long before the shooting, as she prepared to end the couple’s 11-year marriage. (apparently by murdering the father of the children)
He pointed to a backpack Harper had pulled together, with more than $36,000 cash, and passports for herself and her children. Harper said she had packed the bag weeks earlier, following advice she found in domestic violence books recommending that abused spouses have such a bag at their disposal in case they need to flee quickly.
Watanabe also said that her actions afterward — including taking her children out for breakfast, trying to find play dates for the kids, and hiding the gun instead of calling 911 — undermined her claims that she shot her husband in self-defense.
The case will be back in front of Vista Superior Court Judge Blaine Bowman on Oct. 15, at which time the prosecutor is expected to say whether his office will retry Harper on the lesser charges.
VISTA — In the months and weeks before she fatally shot her husband, a Carlsbad woman had disengaged emotionally from her marriage and began putting together the tools she would need to make her exit, a prosecutor said Monday.
“This case is very much about the deterioration of Julie Harper,” Deputy District Attorney Keith Watanabe told a jury Monday during his opening statement.
“She had checked out of this family and checked out of the kids’ lives,” the prosecutor said in Vista Superior Court. “This deterioration very much had an effect on their marriage.”
The prosecutor said Harper, 41, forged checks in her husband’s name about a week before the Aug. 7, 2012 shooting, allowing her to withdraw $9,000 of Jason Harper’s money. She filed for divorce a couple days later.
Watanabe said the evidence would show that Julie Harper also filled a “getaway bag” with several items, including Social Security cards, passports for herself and her children, her husband’s will and $39,000.
He said the bag served as evidence that Harper “knew she was guilty” of murder.
But Harper’s lawyer said the bag — a blue backpack that was found later at Harper’s father’s home — was not evidence of a woman who tried to escape, but of one who was preparing to start a new life after splitting from an abusive husband.
Paul Pfingst told the jury that Jason Harper “hated” his wife, a stay-at-home-mother who he believed was not contributing financially to the marriage. Pfingst said Harper would yell and curse at his wife in front of their three children, and had repeatedly threatened to divorce her.
“The nature of his cruelty will be discussed when Julie testifies,” Pfingst said, adding that it was his client who tried for years to keep the family together.
Eventually, she and filed for divorce yet stayed in the home and did not tell the husband. The shooting happened five days later.
Indicating self-defense may become an issue in trial, Pfingst asked the jury to consider why a woman would file for divorce and then take the life of the person she is divorcing. He said the panel would be asked to determine, after hearing all the evidence, whether the killing was lawful.
Police found The body of the father of the children, Jason Harper in the master bedroom of the family home in Carlsbad , His body was lying face down beneath blankets and other household items. They discovered the body after receiving a call from Pfingst, the lawyer for the woman that gunned him down, who asked them to check the house on Badger Lane.
He had been shot once in his left side with a .38-caliber handgun. The gun was never recovered.
Watanabe told the jury Monday that Julie Harper shot her husband between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., while the couple’s children were watching cartoons downstairs. The two older children — ages 8 and 6 — said later that they heard a thump and went upstairs to see what had happened.
Apparently the shot was fired at point blank range likely being pressed into his body above his heart to muffle the sound.
Harper told them their father had fallen off a chair, the prosecutor said.
Watanabe told the jury that the defendant then carried out a “day of deceit,” during which she took tried to arrange play dates for her children, dropped them off with her sister, sent a text message posing as her husband to a relative’s phone, and then went to her father’s office in Normal Heights.
She and her father retained Pfingst, who arranged for her to surrender to police.
Watanabe painted a very different picture of Jason Harper than was described in court by the defense attorney. “Everybody loved Jason,” he said.
He said the defendant made only a brief mention in divorce filings that her husband had been verbally abusive, used profanity, had pushed and shoved her, and twisted her arm on one occasion.
“This is the extent of Julie Harper’s description of their ‘abusive’ marriage,” Watanabe said.
If convicted of murder and a gun-use allegation, Harper faces a possible sentence of 50 years to life in prison.
VISTA — A woman accused of killing her husband, a Carlsbad High School teacher, while their young children were in another room described her long-deteriorating marriage to a jury Monday.
Julie Harper, 41, of Carlsbad, said husband Jason often screamed and yelled at her, berated her, ridiculed her weight, called her names and eventually cut off her access to their joint checking account — instead giving her a monthly allowance of $260 in the year before the 39-year-old math teacher was shot to death on their bedroom floor Aug 7, 2012.
“I still loved him despite everything he had done to me and (the way he) treated me,” Julie Harper told jurors during three hours on the stand at the Vista courthouse. She is expected to resume testifying in her own defense Tuesday.
Harper is charged with murder and the use of a gun, and faces up to 50 years to life in prison if convicted.
Her testimony thus far has not gone into the details of the deadly encounter, and she has not yet been cross-examined by the prosecutor.
Harper said her husband insisted she pay him $3,000 a month to cover her half of their mortgage and household expenses, even after she stopped working as a real estate agent when the market dried up and she stayed at home with their children. She said she used her savings and inheritance money to cover her half. But she started to run out of money in 2010 and told her husband she would have to contribute less than $3,000 a month — news she said left him “livid.”
In 2008, she was diagnosed with a form of arthritis, but she said he refused to allow her to pay for her medical expenses from their joint checking account.
She eventually began keeping notes about their fights and his treatment of her, including what she said were instances in which he forced her to have sex. She also said their children had grown “terrified” of him. When he died, the older children were ages 6 and 8, and the youngest about 18 months.
In addition to hearing Harper read from the notes she’d kept, jurors also saw recordings she made of two encounters between the pair.
One of the videos — made the night before their 10th wedding anniversary — shows no faces, just voices. Jason Harper can be heard calling his wife names, saying their marriage “sucks (expletive)” and that he was only there for the kids. He also said his wife was “cruel” for paying for $400 in day care expenses from their joint checking account, telling her it was only a joint account if she contributed to it.
The second video, from May 2012, is shot at an odd angle, looking up at Jason Harper as he holds their young son. The child eventually starts to cry as Harper yells at his wife about money and a weekend getaway she had planned for the family of five.
“Don’t force me into going somewhere until I get my $3,000,” he said on the video.
Carlsbad woman who shot husband to death not guilty of 1st-degree murder | UTSanDiego.com.