Two men were convicted Friday of the Christmas Day 2012 killing of a civilian Sheriff’s Department employee in Pasadena.
Jurors deliberated about 15 days before finding Larry Darnell Bishop Jr., 23, and Jerron Donald Harris, 28, guilty of first-degree murder for the shooting death of Victor McClinton, a 49-year-old law enforcement technician who was walking a friend to his car when gunfire erupted at Newport Avenue and Wyoming Street.
“We’re obviously disappointed in the verdict. We don’t feel justice was served,” defense attorneys Elena Saris and Richard Lasting said in a joint statement. “We were denied the opportunity to present relevant evidence in their defense and hope the appellate court rights the injustice.”
Bishop and Harris are due back before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis B. Rappe for sentencing on July 15. Both men are facing life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to Deputy District Attorney Amy Ashvanian.
Along with the murder charge, jurors found true the special circumstance allegation of murder during a drive-by shooting against both defendants.
The panel also found true a special circumstance allegation against Harris that the victim was killed while Harris was an active participant in a criminal street gang and that the murder was carried out to further the activities of a criminal street gang. Jurors rejected that allegation against Bishop, but found true a separate gang allegation against him along with gun allegations against both men.
Bishop and Harris were also convicted of the attempted murder of the intended target, who was wounded and ended up crashing his vehicle into a tree.
Harris was also convicted of two counts of shooting at an inhabited dwelling and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Bishop was acquitted of those charges.
The jury was the second to consider the case against Bishop and Harris. Jurors deadlocked last July in their first trial.
During that trial, the prosecutor called it a “gang-related murder” and said two houses were struck by the gunfire.
McClinton’s widow testified in the first trial that she originally thought the shots were fireworks.
“Then I realized that’s not fireworks,” Shelly McClinton told jurors in June 2015, noting that she discovered her husband laying on the ground.
“He was shaking. There was blood coming from his nose,” she said, adding that there was a “puddle of blood.”
In the first trial, Saris acknowledged the tragedy.
“An innocent bystander and, by all accounts, a very good man was killed … There’s no denying the senselessness and the randomness of this killing,” said Saris, who represented Bishop.
But the defense attorney said there was “absolutely no evidence that Mr. Bishop was in the car at the time of the shooting.”
Pasadena police arrested Bishop three days after the shooting, and Harris was taken into custody early the next month. Both men have remained jailed since then.
— City News Service