Lana Skye

"Miles Edgeworth"

- Lana Skye is the Chief Prosecutor... the top prosecutor in the district.

Lana Skye was the defendant in the Bruce Goodman murder case. She was the Chief Prosecutor of Los Angeles at the time, but the case exposed her involvement in forging evidence during the SL-9 Incident.

Early life
Lana Skye's parents died in a car accident when she was a teenager, which left her caring for her younger sister Ema. Despite all this, she managed to make it to law school, even being at the top of her class by her third year. When Mia Fey audited one of Lana's classes, the two became friends and shared an "intellectual bond", having so many similarities with each other. The first book that Lana ever bought was called Scientific Investigation.

Detective career
Lana eventually joined the Criminal Affairs Department as a detective and moved up in the ranks. She ended up working alongside, and sharing an office with, Damon Gant. The pair was famous for some time, becoming known as the "Legendary Duo." Lana was admired by her fellow detectives and a number of them looked up to her, including Angel Starr. However, this reputation did not last.

SL-9

 * Main article: SL-9 Incident

"Lana Skye"

- We did what we had to... in order for him to get the verdict he deserved. Even if it involved forging evidence.

Lana became involved in the investigation of the spree killings of Joe Darke, working alongside Bruce Goodman, Jake Marshall, Angel Starr and Damon Gant. Jake's brother Neil Marshall was to prosecute. It was a clear-cut case; Darke even turned himself in. Lana made dinner plans with her sister Ema, who waited in Lana's office for her. However, Darke escaped during an interrogation and made his way to that same office, with Neil in hot pursuit.

When Lana arrived at the crime scene, she found Ema and Darke unconscious on the floor, and Neil impaled on the sword of a decorative suit of armor. The evidence before her seemed to indicate that Ema had killed Neil, which made her panic for the first time in her life. Gant, who had also arrived at the scene, agreed to help her rearrange the crime scene to shift the blame away from Ema and onto Darke. They moved the body - though not before taking a photo as she had found it - and planted part of Darke's knife in the corpse. Ema woke up in Lana's arms, and the police eventually arrived to conduct the ensuing murder investigation.

With the crime scene altered, as well as with the help of what little Ema could remember from the incident, Darke was convicted of Neil's murder (on top of the existing charges) by a different prosecutor, Miles Edgeworth, and he was subsequently executed. However, Gant began to manipulate Lana by threatening to expose all the evidence that seemed to point towards Ema being the real killer. He arranged to have Lana transferred to the prosecutor's office and promoted to the position of Chief Prosecutor, so that he could have unhindered power over all investigations. Lana withdrew into herself, becoming cold so as to help deal with all the things Gant would have her do over the next two years. Meanwhile, nearly all of the other detectives involved in the incident were fired or demoted, save Bruce Goodman.

Murder of Bruce Goodman

 * Main article: Rise from the Ashes



The events of SL-9 came to a head with the murder of Bruce Goodman. Gant had killed Goodman in a panic, having felt threatened by the detective insisting that the SL-9 case be reopened, and ordered Lana to dispose of the corpse. She transported the body via an oblivious Miles Edgeworth's car trunk to the underground parking lot of the Prosecutor's Building. She immediately recognized the knife in Goodman's body as belonging to Darke. She wrapped it in the muffler she normally wore around her neck and placed it in the muffler of the car.

Lana took a knife she found in Edgeworth's car and stabbed the body with it to have it later established as the murder weapon. Unused to stabbing a man, even a dead one, she was shaking as she plunged the knife in and ended up cutting her right hand. She attempted to phone her sister on a wall-mounted telephone in the parking lot to tell her to dispose of Darke's knife, but it was out of order. She then attempted the call again on her mobile phone, but the signal was poor. Before she could properly talk to her little sister, Angel Starr appeared. Having seen what she thought was the Chief Prosecutor committing murder, Starr rushed down from the security office overlooking the lot and arrested Lana, but not before the supposed killer kicked over an oil drum filled with water to wash away any bloodstains on the ground.

Trial and aftermath
Lana readily accepted the blame for the murder to protect Gant and prevent the truth behind the SL-9 Incident from being found out. Ema, however, did not believe that her sister was responsible and set out to hire Lana's fellow alumnus Mia Fey. Although she was soon told that Fey "no longer... work[ed]" at the office she went to, she happily settled for Phoenix Wright, a former student of Mia Fey's, to defend her. With Edgeworth once again at the helm of the prosecution, Wright began to uncover the connection between Goodman's murder and the SL-9 Incident, despite Lana's repeated confessions to the crime. Lana knew that uncovering the truth would mean uncovering Ema as the killer, but Wright pressed on, with Edgeworth eventually allying with him. Lana was eventually compelled to confess that some of the SL-9 evidence had been tampered with.

Wright and Edgeworth eventually suspected Gant as Goodman's killer. Realizing this, Gant attempted to manipulate both of them, and even coerced Lana into testifying against herself. However, Wright saw through and disproved all of the lies. Lana eventually decided to cooperate with Wright and gave him a book, Evidence Law, which allowed Wright to formulate a plan to trap Gant. It was revealed that Gant was responsible not only for Bruce Goodman's murder, but also for Neil Marshall's murder. Ema had been completely innocent all along, and Gant had simply manipulated the crime scene before Lana's arrival to convince her that Ema had killed Neil.

Although Lana was cleared of the murder charge, by aiding in the forging of evidence, she had set herself up for severe punishment, making it unlikely that she would still hold the position of Chief Prosecutor. Despite this, all Lana really cared about was that Ema was innocent after all, and that Gant no longer had control over her. She smiled for the first time since the SL-9 Incident, and held out hopes that she would be able to return to her field at some point and investigate crimes with Ema. To this end, Lana arranged for Ema to move to Europe to live with a coroner friend of hers.

Personality
Lana is very disciplined and hard-working, as evidenced by her success in law school and in the Criminal Affairs Department, all while taking care of Ema. Being left with Ema to care for has, in itself, caused Lana to have a motherly slant in her relationships with her peers as well as Ema. In Mia Fey, she found someone she could easily relate to, since they bore many similarities. Both lost their mothers when they were young, and were left with their younger sisters. They even wear scarves tied round their necks in a similar fashion and have had vaguely mentioned relationships with colleagues, Diego Armando in Mia Fey's case and (allegedly) Jake Marshall in Lana Skye's case. .

Before the SL-9 incident, Lana was described as a cheerful and happy person. She was widely liked by her peers and she in turn felt responsible for them. After SL-9, however, she became withdrawn and cold to the point that all who knew her thought she had become a different person. Upon the conclusion of her trial, she returned to her pre-SL-9 self. Despite the changes in her personality over the years, there has been one constant: her love for her sister. This love was so great that she covered up Ema's supposed crime and was willing to face the death penalty rather than reveal what she believed was the truth. Ema wondered why they were growing apart, but the truth was that everything that Lana did was to protect her little sister. The rift between the two was repaired when the truth was revealed.

Name

 * The kanji in her Japanese surname "Houzuki" (宝月) mean "treasured moon" or "jeweled moon".


 * The surname "Skye" may be a reflection of Ema's Japanese given name "Akane" (茜), which may come from the phrase "akane sasu sora", meaning "a glowing sky".

Development

 * Apparently her military uniform-like clothing was to symbolize her strict discipline of her feelings and secrets.


 * Her three medals are for winning the Prosecutor of the Year Award three times. However, this should not be possible, as she was only a prosecutor for two years when Wright met her. Said medals are absent from many of the flashback scenes and photos of her.


 * In Turnabout Sisters, Redd White calls the "Chief Prosecutor" to have Phoenix Wright arrested. This has led to the belief that Lana Skye is this individual. However, this is a mistranslation, and the position mentioned in Turnabout Sisters is in fact different from the one that Lana Skye held. The "Chief Prosecutor" in question also acts far more emotionally than Lana would at that point in time and is insinuated to be male, judging mainly from the "male" (deeper) blip sound displayed when they are speaking, as well as White's line: "Are you even listening? The executioner! The hatchet-man! The liquidator... The killer, man!"


 * In-game, when a character is speaking, the noise used as the text appears on the screen usually differs depending on the gender of the speaker; deeper if male and higher pitched if female. Oddly, when Lana Skye says her name to Wright, the speech tone changes to the "male" tone. This is likely just an error.


 * Lana Skye is the only character whose large frontal sprite turns around to show her back. Manfred von Karma also has a back-facing animation, but only for his sideways prosecutor's bench sprite.