Music mogul Spector to be sentenced

Music producer Phil Spector will be sentenced in Los Angeles today for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

The 68-year-old was found guilty in April of second degree murder – a conviction that alone carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life imprisonment – and using a firearm in committing a crime.

Spector’s lawyers have asked the court to trim the prison term for the lesser offence from four to three years, leaving the music-maker facing a probable 18-year-plus sentence.

Clarkson, 40, was murdered on February 3, 2003, hours after meeting Spector at the House of Blues nightclub.

The actress and bar hostess was killed in the early hours of the next morning by a single gunshot to the mouth in the foyer of the producer’s mansion.

Two successive juries heard testimony from Spector’s driver claiming Spector emerged from the house brandishing a gun and saying: “I think I killed someone.”

But his lawyers maintained Clarkson committed suicide. In an magazine interview, Spector said she “kissed the gun” before pulling the trigger herself.

The first trial was ended in 2007 after jurors failed to reach a unanimous decision required under law. They were stuck at 10 to two in favour of a conviction.

In the retrial, jurors were offered the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter, but opted against it.

They sided with prosecution lawyers, who painted Spector as a violent man with a gun obsession.

During the retrial they brought forward a string of women who claimed they had been threatened by Spector.

The woman he killed was a B-film actress, best known for her part in the 1985 cult film 'Barbarian Queen'.

Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson said after the conviction: “It could have happened years earlier with any of the other women but she got the bullet.”

Before today’s sentence hearing, Spector’s lawyer Doron Weinberg filed a court document in which he maintained his client did not kill Clarkson and was not responsible for her death.

Mr Weinberg added that the prosecution’s account of the woman’s death was “based on conjecture, not facts”.