A$AP Rocky Trial, With Twists And Controversial Prosecutor, Nears Conclusion

The trial of rapper A$AP Rocky on felony assault charges has featured some bizarre twists, not least of which is the controversy surrounding Deputy District Attorney John Lewin.

Lewin is currently the target of a planned lawsuit from two fellow Los Angeles prosecutors who allege harassment and retaliation after they recommended the resentencing of convicted murderers Erik and Lyle Menendez based on new evidence, but he is perhaps most famous for prosecuting real estate heir Robert Durst for murder, then vacationing at his widow’s Hamptons mansion.

Durst was suspected in the 1982 disappearance of his wife Kathleen McCormack Durst in New York, and was acquitted of murdering his neighbor Robert Morris in Texas, before finally being convicted in October 2021 of the 2000 murder of Susan Berman in Los Angeles. Lewin famously kept Durst on the stand for nine days of aggressive questioning. Durst died behind bars in January 2022.

In depositions for a wrongful death lawsuit filed by McCormack’s family, Durst’s widow, Debrah Lee Charatan, confirmed that Lewin stayed overnight at her Bridgehampton home soon after the trial. In his own deposition a couple of months after Durst’s death, Lewin said he and his daughter stayed at Charatan’s home during a trip to New York City.

Brock Lunsford and Nancy Theberge say they plan to sue Lewin and District Attorney Nathan Hochman, who recently took the office over from former DA George Gascón, for harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, after they say they were demoted for recommending the resentencing and release of the Menendez brothers. Lunsford, a 25-year veteran of the DA’s office, was reassigned to “calendar deputy,” while Theberge was sent to the alternate public defender’s office.

According to Lunsford and Theberge, Lewin allegedly defamed the pair on social media, saying Theberge “had no interest in justice, wanted to let criminals out of jail and was dishonest in her filings with the Court,” and referring to Lunsford as a “quisling,” a term derived from the name of infamous Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, and used generally to mean traitor or enemy collaborator.

Lewin himself previously sued Gascón along with more than a dozen other prosecutors who were reassigned after the former DA took office. Lewin was moved from Major Crimes to calendar deputy, the same position to which Lunsford was recently assigned.

California-based lawyer Alan Yockelson, who specializes in appellate law, says he has a complaint against Lewin pending before the State Bar of California in connection with a cold case murder conviction obtained by Lewin in 2014. Yockelson was involved in litigating the appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which later reversed the conviction.

“I reversed a murder conviction that Mr. Lewin obtained, and the Court of Appeals was very clear that in procuring that conviction, Mr. Lewin told an untruth to the jury to try an gain an advantage,” Yockelson said.

The judge in the 2014 trial of Douglas Gordon Bradford ruled that the defense could not present third-party culpability evidence, which would have pointed the finger at another suspect in the gruesome 1979 slaying of 28-year-old nurse Lynne Knight.

Lewin specifically told the jury that Knight was alone the night she was murdered. In fact, Knight had dinner with Joseph Giarrusso, a former boyfriend who had a history of violence with her and was the last person to see her alive, among other circumstantial evidence against him, including his knowledge of what a garrote is and a bandaged thumb in the days after the murder.

The federal Court of Appeals in its 2-1 decision reversing the conviction found the trial court’s “erroneous” exclusion of the exculpatory evidence was “compounded and magnified” when the prosecution was allowed to falsely state to the jury that Knight was alone on the night of the murder. This was particularly true because the case against Bradford was “built entirely on circumstantial evidence.”

Far from being irrelevant, as the California Court of Appeal had held, the federal court said Lewin’s decision to falsely tell the jury Knight was alone shows that the question of whether she was alone was relevant to their decision.

“The prosecution’s decision to argue to the jury that Knight was alone on the night of the murder, confirms that the undisputed evidence that Giarrusso was with the victim at her apartment in the hours leading up to her murder, was centrally connected to the issues before the jury,” the court wrote.

“I’ve been litigating cases involving Lewin for a very long time,” Yockelson said, “and to my knowledge, I’m the first one that ever got a reversal of one of his murder convictions.”

Aside from his legal concerns, Yockelson said Lewin “rants and raves in the courtroom and is rather abusive, in my eyes, to the families of the people he is prosecuting.”

That sentiment was echoed by another attorney who has faced Lewin in court over the course of more than a decade, and who, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lewin “bullies everybody in the courtroom — witnesses, he starts yelling at them, and judges have let him get away with this for years.”

The attorney alleged Lewin speaks inappropriately with defendants and their family members, “even when they’re represented by counsel and he knows, he’s been admonished not to do it.” He also allegedly withholds discovery, which is required to be turned over to the defense, until the last possible moment, such as the same day a witness is scheduled to testify.

“He turns the justice system into a mockery, he perverts it, just so he can win,” the attorney said. “He does not care about the pursuit of justice. Only his own ego.”

Something similar occurred at the start of A$AP Rocky’s trial late last month, when the prosecution submitted new evidence the night before the trial began.

Rocky, 36, (born Rakim Mayers) pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm in connection with an altercation with A$AP Relli (real name Terell Ephron) in Hollywood on Nov. 6, 2021.

The new evidence presented just before trial included shell casings allegedly retrieved by Relli from the scene, which he identified as 9 mm. Lewin said in court that the shell casings have markings consistent with a “Glock model 40 and 43.”

“The markings on these casings are a bit more unique and the examiner will testify that the markings he’s seen are very rare… but align with a Glock 43,” Lewin said. The judge granted the defense’s request for additional time to have its experts examine the shell casings.

Investigators never recovered the gun seen in a surveillance video of the incident, which Rocky’s tour manager, Lou Levin, testified was a prop gun he returned to a music video director.

Rocky is represented by New York-based defense attorney Joe Tacopina, who said in court that the rapper was “advised by security to carry a prop gun” to scare off “potential attackers.”

Tacopina has previously defended President Donald Trump and Fox News host Sean Hannity, who once described him on the air as the “greatest defense attorneys of all time.” Tacopina, according to the New York Times, has “a long history of trial court wins.”

Former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, who was represented by Tacopina when he faced a suspension from Major League Baseball for steroid use, told the Times the attorney “defends you like family.”

“He’s not a person that just phones it in; he lives it,” Rodriguez said.