Sixth District judges ruled against a lower court conclusion that John Kevin Woodward could not be retried after charges were tossed in 1996 following two deadlocked juries.
and is allowing a third murder case against John Kevin Woodward to proceed in the 1992 killing of Laurie Houts, nearly 30 years after Woodward twice avoided conviction by deadlocked juries.
The appellate ruling, authored by Justice Allison Danner, stated a trial-court judge’s 1996 minute order that mentioned “insufficiency of the evidence” — and was heavily relied on by Deen and Woodward — was not definitive enough to indicate the judge meant to bar any future retrial. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office argued that the technical language of Terry’s order should have been contextualized with remarks he made in the same document, including: “There is simply a lack of evidence on which to convict the defendant. Without new evidence, the result of this case will be the same at each successive trial.
Houts, 25, was killed on Sept. 5, 1992, while she drove home from her job at Adobe Systems in Mountain View. Investigators discovered signs of a struggle in her car, and her pocketbook was found unopened nearby. ‘A huge catastrophe waiting to happen’: Aryan Brotherhood drama spills into Northern California courtroom as lawyer joins in the name-calling
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