LOS ANGELES -- Jurors began deliberations Thursday on whether Marvin Pancoast, described by his defense attorney as 'a total failure as a human being,' was insane when he beat Vicki Morgan to death.
'Normal people do not wake up in the middle of the night and hit someone with a baseball bat,' defense attorney Arthur Barens said in closing arguments for the sanity phase of Pancoast's trial.
'He thought he was doing her some good in his own sick way. He didn't understand the nature of what he was doing.'
Barens said Pancoast had failed to establish any successful personal relationship and had no successful jobs.
'He was a man that was without adjustment on any level of life,' Barens said, 'a total failure as a human being.'
Jurors began deliberations at 4 p.m., after instructions by Superior Court Judge David Horowitz, and adjourned for the night about an hour later. The 10-woman, two-man panel was scheduled to resume discussions Friday morning.
Prosecutor Stanley Weisberg discounted testimony by two defense psychiatrists, who said Pancoast was paranoid, schizophrenic and delusional and made a lucid confession of the crime only because he was momentarily jarred into reality by the shock of the death of Miss Morgan - his roommate and former mistress to the late presidential confidant Arthur Bloomingdale.
Weisberg insisted that Pancoast's confession gives 'no sign of a lack of recognition of what he did' and offered 'no description of delusions.'
He told reporters outside court, 'There is no evidence he was ever anything but sane when he committed the crime. He was sane before, he was sane after and he was sane during.'
The final witness in the hearing, a University of Southern California professor and expert in forensic psychiatry, also claimed Pancoast was sane when he beat Miss Morgan to death with a baseball bat as she slept in July 1983.
Under cross examination Thursday morning, Dr. Ronald Markman said the attempt to prove Pancoast was delusional, and therefore legally insane, at the time of the killing was 'leaping a cataclysm that even Evel Knievel couldn't do.'
The same jury that convicted Pancoast, 34, of first-degree murder earlier this month must now decide whether he receives a term of 26 years to life in prison or is sent to a state mental hospital for an indefinite stay.
The state's 1982 insanity law provides that a defendant cannot be found insane unless he was both 'incapable of knowing or understanding the nature and quality of his or her act and of distinguishing right from wrong at the time of the commission of the offense.'
If Pancoast is sent to a mental institution, he could later be found sane and released.
Miss Morgan created a national sensation in 1982 when she filed a multimillion dollar palimony suit against Bloomingdale, claiming she possessed tapes showing government officials involved in sexual hijinks.
A judge dismissed most of the suit, saying Miss Morgan's relationship with the tycoon and friend of President Reagan was that of a high-priced prostitute.