A California judge Monday vacated the 124-year prison sentence handed down 10 years ago to the great-grandson and heir of cosmetics mogul Max Factor, whose flight and capture helped catapult Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman to international stardom.
But Andrew Luster, 49, won't get a new trial on charges that he drugged and raped three women after Judge Kathryne Ann Stoltz found that only his sentencing, not his conviction, was improper, NBC Los Angeles reported.
Stoltz, a retired Los Angeles Superior Court judge, was hired to hear the case in Ventura County Superior Court after Luster argued that he was improperly sentenced in 2003, when he was convicted on 86 counts of giving three women gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, and raping them while they were unconscious.
Stoltz said the judge at Luster's trial failed to state the reasons for giving Luster consecutive sentences on each count, rather than concurrent sentences. She set Luster's resentencing for April 4.
When Luster jumped his $1 million bond during his trial in 2003, Chapman set out after him, capturing the fugitive later that year in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Luster was eventually convicted in a trial in which jurors were shown video that Luster had made of himself engaging in sex acts with some of his victims.
Meanwhile, Chapman and his team were charged with kidnapping Luster — in Mexico. But they, too, jumped bail and fled back to the U.S., where Chapman got a TV contract; "Dog the Bounty Hunter" made its debut on the A&E network in 2004.
A Mexican court dismissed those charges in 2007 because the statute of limitations had expired.
