OAKLAND — Days before a judge is expected to hand down a life sentence, the attorney for well-known transgender activist Dana Rivers has filed a new trial motion arguing that unfavorable judicial rulings, prosecutorial missteps, and a fixation on the Hells Angels denied Rivers a fair trial in her triple-murder case.
Defense attorney Melissa Adams, who defended Rivers during her 2022 trial, argued in a 36-page motion that Rivers’ trial focused too much on biker gangs and not enough on evidence of strife in the marriage of two of Rivers’ three victims. Rivers was convicted of murdering Charlotte Reed, 56, her wife Patricia Wright, 57, and Wright’s 19-year-old son, Benny Toto Diambu-Wright, in a frenzied triple-shooting and stabbing that prosecutors described as gruesome overkill motivated by personal animus and a dispute involving an all-women motorcycle club known as the Deviants.
“The court erred in allowing the prosecution to present evidence that the Deviants paralleled the Hells Angels, thus referring to the Deviants as criminal street gang,” Adams wrote in the motion “This was in violation of the court’s own ruling…The admission of this evidence deprived Ms. Rivers of fair trial.”
In addition to the biker gang evidence, Adams wrote that jurors should have been allowed to learn more about potential problems in Reed and Wright’s marriage, and should have gotten to delve more into Rivers’ medical history. After losing trial during the guilt phase, Adams argued unsuccessfully that Rivers was legally insane when she killed all three victims.
Adams also argued that there was a cosmetic reason why Rivers’ murder convictions should be overturned: She requested a haircut before her jury trial but was denied one.
“Although the court made efforts to secure the haircut, it was unable to do so, and Ms. Rivers was denied fair trial as result,” Adams wrote.
Rivers is next due in court on the morning of June 14, before Judge Scott Patton. If Patton denies the new trial motion, he will likely sentence Rivers the same day. She faces 75 to life on the murder counts alone.
During trial, prosecutors argued that the murders were motivated by a dispute involving an all-female biker gang called the Deviants MC, which the defense argued wasn’t a gang at all. Reed was briefly a member of the now-defunct Deviants, but continued to be friends with Rivers after leaving the club. On the night of the murders, Rivers was supposed to spend the night, but attacked the couple as they slept in their bed, stabbing them dozens of times and shooting them, before shooting their son in the heart.
According to authorities, Rivers arranged to seep over at the couple’s home on on Oct. 10, 2016, and snuck into their bedroom in the early morning hours of Oct. 11. She stabbed them both dozens of times and shot them over and over, inflicting so much damage that the victims were unrecognizable. Afterwards, Diambu-Wright became aware of what had happened and fled from their home into the street, only to be shot in the back while running away.
When police arrived, Rivers was soaked in blood and making her way to a nearby motorcycle. Police then discovered she’d set the garage on fire in an apparent attempt to cover up the crimes. The attempted arson was used by prosecutors to argue that Rivers knew was she did was wrong and was therefore not criminally insane.
Before her arrest, Rivers was best known as a schoolteacher who became an international news story when she came out as transgender to her students in a high school in the Sacramento County community of Antelope. She was subsequently fired for sharing details of her transition, then sued the district and received $150,000 in a settlement. In the aftermath, she became an activist for transgender rights, and ultimately moved to the Bay Area to restart her life as an educator.
Jurors took roughly one day to find Rivers guilty.
Source: www.mercurynews.com