Arkansas: Vance

David Koon reports that forensic psychologist Shawn Agharkar, a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, told a jury this morning trying to decide whether Curtis Vance should die for the murder of KATV anchor Anne Pressly that Vance was brain damaged and paranoid.

Agharkar, the third witness to testify for the defense in the penalty phase of the trial that started yesterday afternoon, said Vance's impairment might not always be noticeable, comparing him to a "vehicle that looks good but has a wiring problem" and may have trouble starting or running.

Agharkar said his review of the battery of tests given Vance earlier in the year indicated he had frontal lobe damage and was incapable of considering options.

It was a productive day in the capital murder trial of Curtis Vance, with prosecutors resting their case and the defense getting close enough that they will more than likely rest theirs first thing in the morning.

Court again ran late tonight, though Judge Chris Piazza had dismissed the jury early in the afternoon. At issue: hammering out instructions for the jury, which may get the case as early as tomorrow, and the testimony of two psychiatrists brought in by the defense to testify before the judge in an attempt to get him to rule that testimony about Vance's cognitive impairment should be admissable in court before the defense officially rests.

The capital murder trail of Curtis Vance in the slaying of KATV anchor Anne Pressly ran past 7 p.m. tonight as jurors were shown a sometimes rambling 4-hours-plus videotaped statement Vance provided police on February 24 of this year.

As seen on the tape: After asking to talk to detectives yet again, Vance initially told them that he'd been in MacArthur Park the night of the Pressly murder, and saw a white person -- he couldn't tell whether the person was male or female, he said -- get out of a blue or black car and dump Pressly's purse and laptop in a trash can.

This morning's testimony in the capital murder trial of Curtis Vance centered on evidence measured in microns, as attorneys questioned employees of the Arkansas State Crime Lab about fluids and hairs found during the investigation into the murder of KATV anchorwoman Anne Pressly.

First on the stand was Lisa Channell, chief criminalist for the Crime Lab, who testified about hair evidence, and the efforts to isolate a DNA sample from items found at the crime scene and swabs collected during a rape examination of Pressly.

Channell said that though the swabs tested positive for a semen-specific antigen known as P-30, she was not able to find any sperm cells, and her testing was not able to connect the contents of the rape kit to a suspect.