Shawn Laval Smith had pleaded both not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to the fatal stabbing of Brianna Kupfer, who was attacked while working alone inside the boutique Croft Furniture in Pacific Palisades.
Pasadena Police officers arrested Smith at a bus stop without incident in Old Pasadena six days after the murder on Jan. 18, 2022, after a citizen called police to say they had seen a man who looked like the suspect shown on media reports.
Smith, now 36, was convicted in 2024 of first-degree murder.
Jurors also found true a special circumstance allegation of murder while lying in wait, along with an allegation that the defendant used a knife during the commission of the crime.
The three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense’s contention that Smith’s trial attorney violated the Racial Justice Act by comparing the defendant’s actions to an animal at the time he killed Brianna Kupfer, 22, on Jan. 13, 2022.
“An objective observer would have understood that counsel was trying to persuade the jury that, like a wild animal, appellant had acted impulsively when he killed Kupfer, and the killing was a sudden, unplanned action,” the panel found in its ruling. “Had the jury accepted counsel’s argument, appellant would have avoided his current sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole … In view of the overwhelming evidence that appellant was the actual killer, a second-degree murder conviction would have been a victory for the defense.”
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mildred Escobedo — who subsequently reviewed reports from a pair of doctors — found there was “absolutely no evidence whatsoever” to show that Smith was insane at the time of the crime.
Citing the “brutality that was demonstrated,” the judge said she would not consider any sentence less than life in prison without the possibility of parole for Smith.
The judge said the defendant knew what right and wrong were. She cited jailhouse calls including one in which Smith said, “All I got to do is play crazy. And then they’ll drop and dismiss the case that way.”
The defendant has remained behind bars since his arrest.
The judge had revoked Smith’s right to act as his own attorney during the trial following a contentious hearing in June 2023 in which he directed profanities at Escobedo during his first appearance before her and abruptly rose from his seat in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom.
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