The man convicted of murdering Cal Poly freshman Kristin Smart argued again that the jury’s verdict should be reversed or reduced to second-degree, new court documents filed on Monday show.

A Monterey County jury convicted Paul Flores, now 48, of the first-degree murder of Smart in October 2022. He was the last person to see Smart alive on Memorial Day weekend 1996. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison.

The filing comes two months after the California Attorney General’s Office called his initial appeal “meritless” and argued his conviction and sentence should remain as is.

Flores’ latest brief repeats the same points he argued in his initial appeal, which was filed in October. The appeal argued that there were several errors during his trial and that while just one doesn’t rise to a violation of due process on its own, the accumulation of all the errors does and deprived Flores of a fair trial.

Now that the appeal has been fully briefed, the court can schedule a date for oral arguments. That date had not yet been set as of Tuesday at noon.

What are the main arguments in Paul Flores’ appeal?

Flores’ main arguments were that Juror 273 should have been removed, the two women who claim Flores raped them should have not been allowed to testify and that former San Luis Obispo County Deputy District Attorney Chris Peuvrelle committed misconduct when he used a ball-gag photo in his closing arguments.

His attorney at the time, Robert Sanger, had attempted to remove Juror 273 four separate times for various reasons, including when she had a “dramatic emotional outburst” that caused other jurors to console her after archaeologist Cindy Arrington said a soil stain found under neath the deck of Flores’ father, Ruben, was the result of bodily fluids seeping out during the human decomposition process.

Monterey County Superior Court Judge Jennifer O’Keefe repeatedly found Juror 273 to be unbiased against Flores, a decision Flores argues was an error in his appeal but the attorney general argues was correct.

Juror 273 told The Tribune in April 2023 that she was one of three jurors on the first day of deliberations who were not convinced Flores should be convicted of Smart’s murder.

She told The Tribune she remained neutral throughout the trial — even after her emotional outburst — and she and two other jurors had to make sure there was enough circumstantial evidence to outweigh not having a body.

“We all wanted to make sure that whatever decision we came to, we all agreed on,” she said at the time. “We all did it personally on our own.”

She and other jurors interviewed by The Tribune did say the most compelling evidence in the trial was the testimonies of the two women who said they were raped by Flores.

Flores claims there was no evidence that he sexually assaulted Smart, saying O’Keefe abused her discretion in allowing them to testify. Evidence of past uncharged sexual assault can be allowed in court when a defendant is on trial for a sexual-based offense.

Flores was charged with murder in the commission of a rape or attempted rape — a qualifying sex crime that allowed the women’s testimony to be admitted, the attorney general argued.

When Peuvrelle asked the jury, “Did it look like the woman with the ball gag in her mouth was having fun in this conspiracy theory?” during closing arguments, it was in response to the defense’s argument that said the case amounted to nothing more than a “fun” conspiracy, the Attorney General’s Office argued.

That comment marked Sanger’s eighth motion for a mistrial — an request O’Keefe denied. Flores holds that the statement was made to inflame the jury against him, his appellate brief said.

Flores also claimed O’Keefe also should not have allowed Trevor Boelter to testify that Smart looked like she had been “roofied” or repeat a rumor from a newspaper article, and he alleged O’Keefe misstated an element of attempted rape of an intoxicated person during her jury instructions — both assertions the Attorney General’s Office disagrees with.