02/16/2000
By GARY McELROY
Staff Reporter

Did Tina Marie Temple bury a butcher knife in her common-law husband's chest because she was a battered spouse or because she was drunk and wanted him dead out of a furious and willful hatred?

This is a question with which jurors will grapple today when they return to begin deliberations in Temple's murder trial in Mobile County Circuit Court.

Temple, 40, is accused of stabbing Carlton Bosarge to death at their Hillcrest Road apartment on Feb. 13, 1999.

According to testimony, the couple, who had a history of knock-down, drag-out fights, got into an escalating shouting match the day Bosarge died.

Temple has never denied she wielded the knife, but only in self-defense, she said.

Prosecutors say she shoved 7 inches of its blade into Bosarge's chest because she had a mean streak that often emerged when she had been drinking.

On the day of Bosarge's death, according to testimony, she stabbed him at the foot of their apartment stairs, left the knife on a coffee table, locked the front door and drove Bosarge's pickup to a BP gas station, where she purchased beer. A little later, from a bar, witnesses testified, she called 911 to report the incident.

Temple testified Tuesday afternoon and spoke of years of abuse - both the kind she received and the kind she dished out to Bosarge.

She said the day he was killed, she had planned to leave him.

"I wanted ... to go to Mississippi and get a job where he couldn't find me," she said.

Temple said Bosarge, 47, was cursing her as he came down the stairs of their apartment and she ran to the kitchen and grabbed a 14-inch butcher knife.

"I'm not going to let you do this again," she said she told Bosarge as he continued down the stairs. "He came at me. He wasn't even worried about that knife, because he didn't think I would (use it)."

Temple said she did not believe Bosarge was hurt seriously, once she stabbed him.

She said she believed it was "just a little stick."

Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Edmond Naman, during an often combative cross-examination of Temple, challenged her on that characterization of her knife thrust.

The puncture went through "skin, muscle, bone, ribs, heart, lung and liver," Naman told her.

At one point, Naman approached her and asked her to demonstrate for the jury exactly how she wielded the weapon against Bosarge.

"No," she said, and shuddered. "I'm not going to hold that knife."

A psychologist, Dr. Barbara Manning, testified for the defense Tuesday, telling jurors Temple's case is a classic example of the battered spouse syndrome.

"Is Tina a battered woman?" the defendant's attorney, Dom Soto, asked the psychologist.

"An extremely battered woman," she replied.

Naman suggested to Manning that Temple could have faked crying during interviews with the psychologist in the past year.

"At this point," Manning said of her experience, "I can tell if someone is genuinely crying or trying for the Academy Award."

"She was not the battered wife Dr. Manning suggested," Naman told jurors in closing arguments. "She enjoyed a fight. And she could stand up with the best of them."