Judge: LA Murderer Can’t Represent Himself

A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge has ruled that a man charged with the brutal stabbing murder of a 24-year-old college co-ed can no longer represent himself at his murder trial.  The judge’s order came following an outburst in the courtroom where Shawn Laval Smith continuously cursed the judge and jumped out his seat, requiring his removal from the hearing.  My News LA reports that Smith will be confined to a security chair and represented by a public defender for his next court appearance.

According to police, Smith, who has over a dozen arrests in three states, was caught on surveillance video leaving the Hancock Park furniture store at the time of the murder.  When Smith entered the store armed with a knife on the early afternoon of January 12, 2022, UCLA student Briana Kupfer, a store employee, was the only other person there.  She texted a friend that someone had just come into the store that gave her a “bad vibe.”  Twenty minutes later a customer found her body on the floor, covered in blood.   According to the LA Times,  the coroner determined that Kupfer received 46 sharp-force injuries in the attack.  Her injuries included 11 stab wounds to her chest, two to her abdomen, one to her pelvis and seven to her arms. She also was sliced in at least 20 places on her body, the autopsy shows. Her attacker inflicted so many wounds — many of them 5 inches deep — that Kupfer died from exsanguination, according to the autopsy. Her aorta, liver, lungs and stomach were repeatedly penetrated by a sharp blade, a medical examiner said.

At the time of Kupfer’s murder, Smith was out on bond pending a trial in South Carolina on charges of firing a flare gun into a moving vehicle with a child inside in 2019.  In 2016, he was arrested in Charleston County, S.C., where he pleaded guilty in 2018 to resisting or assaulting a police officer and was sentenced to time served, according to court records.

In January 2021, Smith vandalized a car in Daly City, Calif., and when officers arrested him, he resisted and bit one of them, according to court records.  He was charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.  Smith subsequently pleaded no contest to one felony charge of resisting arrest. In addition to an eight-month jail sentence, Smith was ordered to serve two years of probation.  He was released after serving half of the jail sentence and failed twice to report to his probation officer.  His probation was revoked and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest, but he had already left the county.  Records show that Smith also was arrested in October 2020 in a misdemeanor case in Covina, but the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office under newly elected DA George Gascon, declined to file charges.

Smith is on trial for first-degree special circumstance murder which, if convicted, makes him eligible for the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole.  Under Gascon’s leadership, prosecutors in his office are prohibited from seeking the death penalty.