Justices won’t hear arson-murder case

A Los Angeles man who burned down the house of his therapist and killed her husband in the blaze 24 years ago has been spared a death sentence.

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused a plea from state prosecutors to a review a ruling of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned William Clark’s death sentence for murder and arson.

The court’s action leaves intact Clark’s conviction for first-degree murder, attempted murder and arson, which means he probably will remain in prison.

“I’m disappointed that the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. This was a carefully calculated, cold-blooded, horrific murder, and there was never any doubt about the defendant’s guilt,” said Scott Taryle, a deputy attorney general in Los Angeles. “This was reversed on a technicality.”

The state and the 9th Circuit disagreed over whether the arson in this case qualified as a “special circumstance” that made Clark eligible for the death penalty.

In 1982, Clark was angry at his therapist, Ava Gawronski, when she refused to continue counseling him after he threatened to rape her. He concocted a plot to set her West Los Angeles home ablaze, then to shoot and kill her husband when he fled the fire.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 6, Clark threw a bucket of gasoline and highway flares into the house. But rather than escaping, David Gawronski was badly burned and died eight days later. Ava Gawronski suffered severe burns, but survived the attack.

Clark surrendered to police the next day and confessed.

At his trial, Clark took the witness stand and explained that his plan had gone wrong. Shortly after throwing the gasoline into the house, he heard screams and determined he had set the bedroom ablaze.

“I realized at that point that I was not going to do what I’d set out to do specifically,” Clark said. His plan to shoot the fleeing husband “was no longer operable,” he explained.

So he went to the other side of the house and ignited a gasoline fire there, trapping the couple in the burning house.

A jury convicted Clark of murder and attempted murder. And after finding him guilty of the “special circumstance” of an arson-murder, the jury said he should be sentenced to death.

The California Supreme Court upheld Clark’s conviction and death sentence, as did a federal judge.

In March, however, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit reversed the death sentence. The judges interpreted California death-penalty law as it was in the 1980s to require that the murderer commit an “independent” crime, such as arson.

In Clark’s case, however, the arson and murder were part of one crime, the appeals court found.

Judge William Fletcher wrote that Clark “set the fire only for the purpose of driving David Gawronski out of the house so that he could shoot him.” If the “sole purpose” of the arson was “to facilitate the primary crime of murder,” it was not a separate and independent crime as required by California law at the time, he concluded. Judges Dorothy Nelson and Raymond Fisher agreed.

In August, Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer filed an appeal that argued the 9th Circuit had misinterpreted state law, but did not claim that the ruling would affect other past cases.

State public defenders who had represented Clark said the case was “a poor candidate” for review by the Supreme Court because it involved an unusual set of facts and a legal rule that was changed in 1990.

On Monday, the high court said in a one-line order that it would not hear the case. The court agrees to take fewer than 1% of the cases that are appealed.

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david.savage@latimes.com