Pre-trial motions were filed earlier this week in the re-trial of Antolin Garcia-Torres, the man accused of killing 15-year-old Morgan Hill girl Sierra LaMar while she was on her way to school in March 2012.
The case of the 2012 murder of Sierra LaMar was one of several that rocked the Bay Area in the last decade, at least in part because LaMar’s body has never been found. And while Antolin Garcia-Torres, now 35, was convicted of her murder in 2017 and sentenced to life without parole, his conviction was overturned earlier this year by California’s Sixth District Court of Appeal. The appellate court found that the court that tried Garcia-Torres had improperly allowed him to be tried simultaneously for the kidnappings of three women three years before the murder, in 2012, on top of other issues with the trial.
The Santa Clara County DA’s office has opted to retry Garcia-Torres for the murder, and jury selection is now underway. Lawyers for both sides filed a bevy of pre-trial motions on Monday, and among them, as KRON4 reports, was a motion by defense attorney Alfonso Lopez to dismiss the case altogether on double jeopardy grounds — on the grounds that he has already been convicted once for this crime, though double jeopardy typically only applies when an acquittal has occurred…