DNA Evidence on Trial?

Kevin Nicholson was sentenced Friday morning to life in prison for the murder of his ex-wife, Lorrie Tennant-Nicholson.

Asked by Broward Circuit Judge Paul Backman if he wanted to address the court, Kevin Nicholson said: "I am an innocent man. I maintain my innocence".

David P. Rowe Esq. and Client Kevin Nicholson

As the Broward court clerk read the guilty verdict aloud Thursday, Lorrie Tennant-Nicholson's father fixed his gaze on his former son-in-law, nodded his head and choked back tears.

Kevin Nicholson took the verdict in tight-lipped silence, placing his arms behind his back as a courtroom deputy put him in handcuffs.

After eight days of testimony, it took the jurors less than three hours to convict Nicholson of first-degree murder in his ex-wife's death. Nicholson, 32, an avionics specialist from Miramar, faces life in prison.

Norman Tennant, the victim's father who had been staring at Nicholson, threw his head back and fought for composure after the verdict.

"I'm just thanking God that he didn't get away with it," said Tennant-Nicholson's sister, Debbie Peters, who has custody of the couple's two sons, ages 5 and 7. "I'm angry that my sister's gone. I'm angry that I don't have her anymore."

Peters said she resented the defense team's portrayal of her younger sister as a promiscuous woman who carried on with disreputable men. Instead, she said, she wished for her sister to be remembered as an intelligent, loveable woman who documented her stormy relationship with Nicholson in touching, sometimes graphic, poetry.

Tennant-Nicholson was 25 when she was found Aug. 26, 2004, in the locked bedroom of her Hollywood home with eight stab wounds to her chest and neck. Just hours before her death, she had taken the stage at the Ginger Bay Café in Hollywood, reciting poetry at open-microphone night.

Nicholson, a jealous, obsessive man with a habit of showing up at odd hours at his ex-wife's home, left a bloody palm print on the sill of the shattered window above Tennant-Nicholson's bed, said prosecutor Deborah Zimet.

Her sons and mother slept in the next room.

Tennant-Nicholson's lungs were punctured, her jugular vein severed, yet she had no wounds indicating that she tried to defend herself, a sign that she was familiar, or comfortable, with her killer, Zimet said in her closing argument Thursday.

The killing came 24 days after the couple's divorce was finalized.

Nicholson was "disturbed, depressed and angry" about the settlement, which gave Tennant-Nicholson the house and half his monthly salary, Zimet said.

At the end of Zimet's closing argument, Peters stepped into the hallway and cried.

Defense attorney David Rowe said Nicholson loved his wife, but had moved on.

"They're trying to make a divorce into a murder," Rowe said.

Investigators immediately honed in on Nicholson and the state embarked on a "needless, money-wasting, evidence-searching" quest to prejudice the jurors against a responsible, hardworking, highly skilled, innocent man, he said.

Despite numerous DNA tests, none definitively linked Nicholson to the crime, and despite the forceful attack, no blood was found on Nicholson or his clothes, in his car or on his toolbox, Rowe said.

Rowe decried that the two men Tennant-Nicholson had been with at the Ginger Bay Café in the hours before her death had not been tested for DNA.

He took issue with the state's portrayal of Tennant-Nicholson as an "ethereal poet."

"Lorrie Nicholson was a liberated, fun-loving lady with multiple relationships that exposed her unfortunately to a great deal of danger," he said.