A man who was already serving time in state prison when he was charged with the 1983 killing of a single mother in Los Angeles is expected to be sentenced in October to life behind bars without the chance of parole.<\/p>\n
A downtown Los Angeles jury deliberated about 45 minutes Wednesday before convicting Teddy Jerome Young, now 63, of first-degree murder for the January 1983 shotgun slaying of 37-year-old Alice Faye Chatman.<\/p>\n
Jurors also found true the special circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a kidnapping and murder during the commission of a rape, along with an allegation that he personally used a shotgun during the crime.<\/p>\n
Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 1 before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Eleanor J. Hunter.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles police had said Young \u2014 who was serving a 62-year-to-life sentence \u2014 was linked to DNA from a sexual assault kit collected from the victim after testing in 2014 and 2016.<\/p>\n
In her closing argument Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Negin Mostadim told jurors that the victim was an \u201ceasy target\u201d and vulnerable as she walked to a bus stop on her way to work and that Young targeted her because he wanted her purse.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor alleged that the defendant \u2014 who lived within a block of the victim \u2014 wasn\u2019t able to easily get her purse away from her and took her to a house that he knew was abandoned, where he raped her and then shot her in the back. Mostadim said Young killed her because he didn\u2019t want her to be able to leave and tell people what had happened to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t need to kill her. He could have left her there,\u201d the prosecutor said.<\/p>\n
Defense attorney Glen Kiyohara countered that the crux of the case was identification.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho committed this crime? Who killed Ms. Chatman?\u201d he asked jurors.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s attorney said the DNA sample from the sexual assault kit was a \u201clow-level DNA sample\u201d and a \u201cdegraded DNA sample,\u201d and questioned what had happened to it between 1983 and 2014. He also asked jurors to question whether it really showed Young\u2019s DNA profile.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t just blindly take these results \u2026 Simply put, the DNA evidence in this case is based upon a false assumption \u2026 that there was only one donor,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are no eyewitnesses, there\u2019s no video.\u201d<\/p>\n
The prosecutor said in her rebuttal argument that the defense was \u201ctrying to convince you that it\u2019s not him,\u201d and maintained that Young\u2019s DNA was detected in semen from the DNA sample \u201cbecause he raped her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The deputy district attorney told jurors that for 40 years the defendant has not been \u201dheld accountable,\u201d saying \u201cthat stops now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Police said shortly after the case was filed that the victim was the single mother of a 13-year-old son and worked full-time to try to provide a better life for him. They described Young as having a \u201clong criminal history\u201d that included arrests for a series of robberies \u2014 most recently in 1997 in Riverside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who was already serving time in state prison when he was charged with the 1983 killing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":23934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[102059,4231,1582,276,6517,3158,102060,2961,224,5337,17241,9620],"class_list":{"0":"post-182513","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-102059","9":"tag-angeles","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-case","13":"tag-cold","14":"tag-convicted","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-mother","19":"tag-murder"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}