Wendi Adelson, testifying at the 2019 trial of Katherine Magbanua, which ended with a hung jury. (Photo taken as a screencap from trial footage.)
Ed. note: This column originally appeared on Original Jurisdiction, the latest Substack publication from David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction on its About page, and you can subscribe through this signup page.
It’s hard to believe that in a few months, eight long years will have passed since the horrific murder of Dan Markel, a renowned law professor. The theory of law enforcement is that after Markel’s bitter divorce from fellow law professor Wendi Adelson, which involved a contentious child-custody battle, the Adelson family hired two hit men to kill Markel.
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Those two hit men, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, have been convicted for Markel’s murder, and they’re now serving lengthy prison sentences. But the Adelsons have never been charged with anything, and Katherine Magbanua, who allegedly connected the hit men with the Adelsons, also remains unconvicted. In 2019, Magbanua was tried alongside Garcia; he was convicted, while she secured a mistrial.
So almost eight years later, the quest to bring Dan Markel’s killers to justice—all of the alleged killers, not just the two hit men—remains far from complete. Here’s the latest.
Continue reading over at Original Jurisdiction…
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David Lat
, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer and speaker about law and legal affairs. You can read his latest writing about law and the legal profession by subscribing to Original Jurisdiction, his Substack newsletter. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. Before entering the media and recruiting worlds, David worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].