The State - News from July 30, 1985

Jurors in the pending retrial of former People’s Temple cultist Larry Layton should not be allowed to hear a dramatic tape of the Rev. Jim Jones exhorting his Jonestown followers to kill themselves, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in upholding a district judge in San Francisco who felt that the screams of dying children would have an inflammatory effect. A jury in the first trial of Layton, 38, deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal on charges that he conspired to kill Rep. Leo Ryan (D-Calif.), who died in the Guyana airstrip shootings of November, 1978, and diplomat Richard C. Dwyer, who was wounded. Layton previously was acquitted by a Guyana jury of attempting to murder two women who were defecting from the Jonestown jungle compound. Jones and more than 900 of his followers died in a mass suicide shortly after the airstrip killing of Ryan, another woman defector and three newsmen.