Voided Death Sentence to Be Reconsidered

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear another appeal by California prosecutors who are challenging a decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that voided a death sentence in a 25-year-old murder case.

In 1981, Fernando Belmontes broke into a woman’s home in the San Joaquin Valley. He clubbed her, broke her skull and stole her stereo. He described the crime to two accomplices, and then sold the stereo.

Belmontes was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, making him eligible for a death sentence.

In the trial’s penalty phase, prosecutors described Belmontes’ previous crimes, which included severely beating his pregnant girlfriend a month before the murder. The defense argued that his early life had been troubled, and noted that he had responded well during a commitment in a California Youth Authority facility and had “wholesome relationships” with friends and family members.

After the testimony, the judge gave the jurors standard instructions telling them to consider as mitigating evidence the defendant’s age, criminal history and any “other circumstance which extenuates the gravity of the crime even though it is not a legal excuse for the crime.” He did not give them an instruction the defense had requested: that “you should not limit your consideration of mitigating circumstances to these specific factors. You may also consider any other circumstances ... as reasons for not imposing the death sentence.”

The jury voted in favor of a death sentence for Belmontes.

The California state courts upheld his conviction and sentence, as did a federal judge. When the case reached the 9th Circuit, Judges Stephen Reinhardt and Richard A. Paez voted to reverse the death sentence.

“There is a reasonable probability,” Reinhardt wrote, that the jurors were “not likely to be aware ... that the defendant’s potential for a positive adjustment to life in prison constitutes a proper mitigating factor.” Had they been aware of this, they may have spared Belmontes, he said.

Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain dissented from the three-judge panel’s ruling. Seven other judges -- short of the needed majority -- called on the full 9th Circuit to reverse the ruling.

California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer appealed to the Supreme Court, saying “no reasonable juror” would have thought he or she was prohibited from voting to spare Belmontes’ life.

Last year, when the state appealed for the first time, the Supreme Court told the 9th Circuit to reconsider the case under a recent ruling that had restored a death sentence in an Orange County case. But the 9th Circuit simply reaffirmed its ruling.

Lockyer appealed again on behalf of San Quentin State Prison Warden Steven Ornoski. This time, the Supreme Court said it would rule in the case of Ornoski vs. Belmontes.