Judge reschedules trial for woman in ’05 killing
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LIVINGSTON — A state district judge has delayed a trial for a Brookhaven, Miss., woman accused of fatally stabbing her Livingston Parish boyfriend three years ago, the prosecuting attorney said.
Judge Bruce Bennett moved the trial, previously scheduled to start Monday, to 1 p.m. Oct. 1 and Oct. 3, Charlotte Herbert, assistant district attorney for the 21st Judicial District, said Monday.
Herbert said defense attorneys for Rhonda Rose Lambert, 33, also agreed to a bench trial, waiving her right to a jury.
Defendants may waive that right if they are not facing a charge that can bring the death penalty.
Lambert has been charged with second-degree murder in the slaying of Russell Perry, 41, of Maurepas, court records show.
Perry was found April 21, 2005, stabbed 10 times in his bed, court records show.
If convicted, Lambert faces a mandatory life sentence without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence. Bennett suggested at a prior hearing this year that the prosecution may want to lower the charge to manslaughter, which brings up to a 40-year prison sentence.
Lambert also has been charged with aggravated second-degree battery for allegedly hitting another man with a beer bottle near a bar the same day Perry was killed.
Last week, Bennett had been scheduled to continue a hearing on a motion to suppress Lambert’s statements to deputies. That hearing was delayed because Lambert’s defense attorney, Michael Thiel, was at another trial.
During the hearing April 28, attorneys on both sides told Bennett that the trial was not likely to go forward. Herbert said Monday Bennett would deal with the motion to suppress evidence at trial.
In at times contradictory statements, Lambert first told deputies that she told someone else she thought she might have killed Perry but also told deputies she had no memory of doing that.
About an hour later after that first statement, she told deputies she flipped out because they had been fighting and cut him maybe four times.
She told deputies she didn’t intend to kill him but to hurt him like he had been hurting her, an interview transcript says.
