San Francisco, CA: Musician's conviction for killing girlfriend upheld

A state appeals court has upheld the murder conviction of San Francisco blues musician Bruce Brooks for fatally beating his girlfriend, singer Juliette Williamson, with a hammer and dumping her body into the bay.

Brooks and Williamson were well-known street performers who played as the Chicago Brother and Sister Blues Band for more than a decade. They lived in a purple school bus they parked under the freeway below Potrero Hill after moving to San Francisco from Chicago in 1989.

Their relationship had been violent. Williamson was arrested in April 2002 for allegedly biting Brooks in the ear. She told police that Brooks had physically abused her in the past, and she was ordered by a judge to stay away from Brooks. The order was ignored by both.

Brooks' lawyers said Brooks killed Williamson in a drunken rage in May 2002 after an argument in which she smashed his cassette tape deck with a hammer, and later struck him in the head with the hammer or an auto part. Her body, wrapped in a tarp and tossed in the bay at Hunters Point, washed ashore on Yerba Buena Island more than two weeks later.

The defense argued for a manslaughter conviction, saying Brooks, then in his early 50s, was brain-damaged from a childhood injury and further impaired by years of alcohol and drug use. But a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in 2008 and he was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

In a 3-0 ruling Wednesday, the First District Court of Appeal rejected defense lawyers' arguments that they should have been allowed to present evidence of brain scans to support their claim that he did not plan or intend to kill Williamson.

A longtime practitioner of a nuclear medicine technique called Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography, or SPECT, said images of Brooks' brain showed abnormalities that made it "vulnerable to violence."

Some courts have allowed SPECT evidence, but the appeals court said Superior Court Judge Cynthia Lee was justified in excluding it from Brooks' case. The practitioner who conducted the tests was an advocate of the technique rather than a neutral expert, the court said, and his findings did not draw any connection between the brain abnormalities and Brooks' behavior.

Defense lawyer Peter Gold said he would ask the state Supreme Court to review the case.