San Francisco – The California Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to review the murder conviction of a San Francisco lawyer whose dogs fatally mauled a neighbor in an apartment building hallway.
The court unanimously agreed to review an appeals court ruling that reinstated Marjorie Knoller’s second-degree murder conviction.
A Superior Court judge had tossed out the jury’s murder verdict and reduced the conviction to manslaughter.
The appeals court, in reinstating the murder conviction, said Judge James Warren wrongly concluded that in order for Knoller to be convicted of murder, she had to have known that one of the two giant Presa Canario dogs would kill.
The appeals court sent the case sent back to Warren to review the decision under a different standard: that Knoller disregarded a known risk that the dogs presented, including the viciousness of Bane, the male dog mostly responsible for 33-year-old Diane Whipple’s death in 2001.
The appeals court in May also upheld the four-year manslaughter term for Robert Noel, Knoller’s husband. He was not charged with murder because he was not home during the attack.
Both defendants appealed the May decision to the state Supreme Court. The husband’s petition was rejected.
The defendants – both of whom were lawyers – said they were keeping the 100-pound-plus dogs in their apartment on behalf of a state prisoner, who was a white supremacist. The two eventually adopted the prisoner as their son. Knoller, 49, and Noel, 63, both served two years of four-year terms.
A second-degree murder conviction carries a prison sentence of 15 years to life.
