Appeals court reinstates Marjorie Knoller's murder conviction

A California appeals court today reinstated the second-degree murder conviction of Marjorie Knoller, the woman whose dogs fatally mauled neighbor Diane Whipple in a San Francisco apartment building in January 2001.

Knoller, 49, and her husband, 63-year-old Robert Noel, both attorneys, were convicted by a jury in March 2002 of involuntary manslaughter and owning a mischievous animal that caused the death of a human being.

Knoller was also found guilty of second-degree murder, under a theory of "implied malice." She was said at the time to be the first person ever convicted of murder in California in connection with a lethal dog attack.

Noel was not charged with murder because he was not present when the dogs killed Whipple.

Several months after the jury verdicts, a San Francisco Superior Court judge granted Knoller's motion for a new trial on the murder charge. The court found that it could not "say as a matter of law that Knoller (subjectively) knew ... that her conduct was such that a human being would die."

But the 2-1 ruling issued today by a panel of the Court of Appeal in San Francisco states that Warren used the wrong legal standard in deciding whether the murder conviction should stand.

"The question was not whether Knoller knew her conduct was likely to result in the death of someone but whether Knoller knew her conduct endangered the life of another and acted in conscious disregard for life or in wanton disregard for life," the court's majority wrote.

The state appeals court reversed the trial court's granting of a new trial on the murder charge and remanded the case to the trial court for reconsideration of Knoller's new trial motion. If the second-degree murder conviction stands, she could be sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

"Our independent examination of the record establishes that Knoller knew that Bane was a frightening and dangerous animal: huge, untrained and bred to fight," Justice James Lambden wrote for the majority.

In its ruling, the court also upheld Noel's conviction.

Knoller and Noel brought the two Presa Canario dogs, Bane and Hera, into their Pacific Heights apartment in 2000. They resided down the hall from Whipple, a lacrosse coach at St. Mary's College in Moraga who lived with her domestic partner, Sharon Smith.

Knoller and Noel reportedly were raising the dogs for a Pelican Bay State Prison inmate named Paul "Cornfed" Schneider, a reputed member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang serving a life term.

On Jan. 26, 2001, as the 33-year-old Whipple was unlocking her apartment door, she was set upon by the two dogs. Knoller had just returned from taking one of the dogs out for a walk. Whipple died of multiple traumatic injuries and extensive blunt force trauma that caused her to lose one-third of her blood.

The subsequent trial was held in Los Angeles due to extensive pretrial publicity in the Bay Area.

Both Knoller and Noel were sentenced in 2002 to four years in state prison. They were paroled after serving two years.

Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, which defends appeals of criminal convictions, said the ruling would make it much more difficult for the trial court to once again set aside Knoller's murder conviction.

"The court of appeals ruling is important because it affirms the principle that juries' decisions should be overridden by judges only in the most unusual circumstances," Dresslar said.

Knoller's attorneys said in a statement that the appeals court decision was a "defeat for the rule of law."

"The trial judge in this case correctly found that the evidence did not support the jury's murder verdict," the statement read.

The defense attorneys accused the appeals court of creating a new, less-stringent definition of the crime of implied-malice murder.