A jury found dog owner Marjorie Knoller guilty of second-degree murder and the San Francisco couple guilty on all counts Thursday in the dog-mauling trial in Los Angeles.

DOG MAULING Share Your Thoughts Agree With Judge's Decision? Violence: Breeding Or Breed?

Knoller, 46, and her husband, Robert Noel, 60, were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Both were also found guilty of owning a mischievous dog that killed a person.

Knoller faces a sentence of 15 years to life in state prison. Noel could get four years.

Jurors sent word Wednesday that they had reached verdicts on four of the five charges against the San Francisco couple on trial in the fatal mauling of the couple's neighbor, Diane Whipple, about 14 months ago in a hallway outside her apartment in Pacific Heights, Calif.

Knoller was walking the dogs at the time of the attack on the 33-year-old college lacrosse coach. Noel was not present.

It is unclear which charge the jury decided Thursday.

Sharon Smith, Whipple's domestic partner, who testified in the trial, told reporters after the reading of the verdict that the time since the Jan. 26, 2001 attack has been difficult, adding that the most difficult part was listening to Knoller call herself a hero for pulling the dogs off of Whipple.

"The jury didn't buy some of the smokescreens," Smith said. "This is some measure of justice, but there is no real joy."

The four completed verdicts were sealed in an envelope and joined by the fifth before the reading, at about 4:45 p.m. EST. In all, the deliberations lasted more than 11 hours.

The lawyers in the case had been clashing inside and outside court.

Defense lawyer Nedra Ruiz accused prosecutor Jim Hammer of pandering to the gay community by filing charges in the case. Whipple was gay.

Hammer said Ruiz is "desperate" and should have been cited for contempt of court.

The jury had to decide whether the couple should have known their huge dogs, which weighed 125 and 112 pounds, were potentially lethal before they attacked Whipple, who weighed about 110 pounds. Both dogs have since been euthanized.

In his closing argument Monday, Assistant District Attorney James Hammer told the jury that Knoller and Noel knew that their Presa Canarios, Bane and Hera, were aggressive -- and that they had lunged at some people and nipped at others before the attack on Whipple.

But lawyers for the couple countered that the two had no way of knowing the dogs -- part of a fighting breed -- would attack and kill their neighbor.

"It is a case full of passion and prejudice. You saw a lot of passion here this morning (from the prosecutor), and the reason you saw a lot of passion is because that's all there is to this criminal case," Noel's lawyer, Bruce Hotchkiss, told the seven men and five women of the jury.

The case was moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles because of pretrial publicity.

Hammer called the dogs "time bombs," and said Knoller and Noel should have noticed the earlier "explosions."

"This time, it killed a woman," he said, occasionally holding up a plaster cast of one of the dog's jaws and teeth.

Ruiz, Knoller's lawyer, said Sharon Smith lied when she testified that her domestic partner had told her about being bitten by one of the dogs about six weeks before she was killed.

"Sharon Smith has every right to sue for the wrongful death of her girlfriend, but she has no right to come here with false testimony and attempt to frame Marjorie Knoller for murder," Ruiz argued.

She suggested that her client was being tried for reasons of political expediency, saying that Hammer may be seeking "to curry favor with the homosexual and gay folks who are picketing (at the apartment complex) and demanding justice for Diane Whipple (pictured, left)."

Other dog-mauling cases in the United States in which murder charges were brought:

Sabine Davidson of Milford, Kan., was convicted of second-degree murder in 1997 after her three Rottweilers killed an 11-year-old boy. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Jeffrey Mann of Cleveland was sentenced to 15 years to life in 1993 for murder after he knocked his wife unconscious and ordered his pit bull to attack her.

Two years ago, James Chiavetta of San Bernardino County, California, was charged with second-degree murder but convicted instead of involuntary manslaughter after his pit bull mix killed a 10-year-old boy. He had left the dog unleashed in the yard with an open gate while he napped. He was sentenced to four years in prison.