Hello and welcome to

through prime day at least the sidebar taking you inside the courtrooms and trials of high profile and notorious cases from across the country. I'm your host Joshua Ritter. I'm a criminal defense lawyer based here in Los Angeles and previously in LA County prosecutor for nearly a decade.

We are recording this on Friday March 25th 2022 and today we are excited to be joined by a former prosecutor who has made his way into television.

You may know him from court TV. Please welcome Emmy award winning legal journalist Vinnie Palatine. Vinnie, thank you so much for coming on.

Great to see you. We're talking about notorious cases. We've got a couple of notorious lawyers here today where I hope we're suited properly for the job. I think we are.

Today we're going to be talking about several high profile cases making headlines that you talk about daily on your broadcast and I know listeners are eager to hear your take because you follow them so closely. But before we jump into all of that, can you please tell us a little bit about your background and how you went from a prosecutor to the anchor chair.

Yeah, this it was really coming back to my first love when I was an undergrad and my whole life, I have microphones in my hand. I mean, I'm sitting in my home studio and I'm surrounded by audio tapes from the time I was like, you know, seven years old, little cassettes. I've got real to reels.

My father bought me a video camera like in the early early 80s and I just started, you know, reporting myself and others. So it was really my first love.

But my other love was was the law, which was I call it also a genetic defect, right, because my father and my brother, both lawyers, my father became a federal judge. So that was a big influence in my life. So,

with that influence and the love of what I do right now, I put everything together that I love, you know, to be able to be on television, but have an area that you have passion about to talk about.

You're not just generically talking about whatever I'm talking about stuff that I love, I breathe, I eat, I was reared on cop shows and lawyers shows and, you know, my dad telling his stories from the courtroom.

So it's really like full circle for me, but making that transition was not easy because nobody wants to be the first person to pay you to be on TV. So I took some wrangling to do that.

That's fantastic. I know exactly how you feel both my father and brother are lawyers as well and is is try as I might it was like I was predestined to go to law school, but I'm happy that I did and I'm happy that I'm sitting here talking to you about it.

Okay, so let's jump right in the first case is Billy Ray Turner. This was a conviction that came down just recently in the slaying of former NBA player Lorenzin Wright, whose body was found in a field in Memphis riddled with unshot wounds.

A jury found Turner guilty of first degree murder attempted murder and conspiracy and he's already been sentenced to life in prison for the murder conviction. He'll be sentenced on the other charges later.

Prosecutors alleged that Wright's ex wife Shera Wright was behind the whole plot to kill him. The alleged motivation was an insurance policy for nearly a million bucks.

She entered a surprise guilty plea to facilitation of the murder back in July of 2019 and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Shera allegedly enlisted the help of Billy Turner, a landscaper she met in church to carry out the hit with another gentleman named Jimmy Martin and Jim Martin is himself serving 20 years sentence for the murder of his girlfriend.

Shera lured Wright to a remote location where he was ambushed and the prosecution played and you can tell us more about this a very chilling 911 call made by Lorenzin in which you can hear the gunshots that most likely took his life.

My first question is the verdict came back in this case and less than three hours. Was that shocking to you?

Not necessarily. I mean you either.

Because this is a case right where people who were involved Jimmy Martin is one of the people involved in the plot so he had all the inside information.

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