9:05am | The California Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to review a case involving a Long Beach woman who suffers from multiple sclerosis convicted last year of killing her mother before setting the apartment the two shared on fire.
Valaria Garnett, 55, was convicted of second-degree murder and arson of an inhabited structure for her mother’s Jan. 17, 2003, murder, for which she was sentenced last year to 18 years to life in prison.
The state’s 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected in March Garnett’s petition claiming that her Los Angeles Superior Court trial was flawed. Specifically, she claimed that her trial was prejudiced because the trial court refused to suppress evidence and exclude the results of experiments conducted by fire investigators, as well as allowed hearsay testimony. She also claimed that her legal counsel was ineffective in failing to obtain her medical records in a timely manner.
That three-judge panel found that Garnett’s argument that the cumulative effect of the alleged errors she cited required her verdict to be reversed had no merit.
Presiding Justice Norman L. Epstein wrote in the Court of Appeal’s March 15 decision that the panel found no error that “by itself or together with other errors affected the jury verdict.”
To automatically download a copy of the Court of Appeal’s decision, click here.
Garnett’s 69-year-old mother, Margaret, who was wheelchair-bound, was found dead in the North Long Beach apartment she and her daughter shared by firefighters who responded to the residential blaze.
The lengthy investigation revealed that Garnett had killed her disabled mother to free herself from having to care for the wheelchair-bound woman and then set parts of the home on fire in an attempt to cover up the crime.
Garnett was not arrested and charged with the murder until 2007. During that time, she maintained her initial claim that the fire was sparked by one of her mother’s cigarettes. However, arson investigators concluded after traveling to Baltimore to conduct a series of tests and simulations of the fire at the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Fire Research Laboratory that the fire had been intentionally set with a match or open-flame device.