A US court overturned Thursday rulings which squashed convictions against late model Anna Nicole Smith’s boyfriend and most convictions against her former psychiatrist.
Howard K. Stern and Khristine Eroshevich were convicted in October 2010 of conspiring to provide drugs to the former Playboy model, who died of a drug overdose in Florida in 2007.
But at a sentencing hearing last year Los Angeles judge Robert Perry dismissed Stern’s two conspiracy convictions, citing insufficient evidence, and three of Eroshevich’s four convictions. The 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled however Thursday that Perry erred in Stern’s case, saying he could allow a new trial, dismiss the convictions on other grounds or sentence him based on the original convictions.
In Eroshevich’s case the judge could order a retrial or dismiss the convictions on other grounds, it said in a 34-page ruling by a three-judge panel.
An autopsy following Smith’s February 2007 death — a worldwide media sensation at the time — found it was due to a lethal cocktail of anti-anxiety medication, methadone, antibiotics and other prescription drugs. It came just months after her son, 20-year-old Daniel, died from an overdose in the Bahamas in September 2006. Born Vickie Lynn Marshall, Smith married Texas billionaire oil tycoon Howard Marshall in 1994, after meeting him earlier when she was working at a strip club. She was 26 at the time and he was 89.
The platinum blonde was regarded as one of the world’s most desirable women in the 1990s when she replaced supermodel Claudia Schiffer as Guess Jeans model. She was also Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year
in 1993.
