State High Court Overturns 2 More Death Sentences

The state Supreme Court overturned two death sentences Thursday, one of them imposed on a defendant convicted of killing two California Highway Patrol officers near Sacramento on Christmas Eve, 1978.

But the court upheld the conviction of the man charged in the notorious case and said the sentence could be reinstated without a full-blown retrial. And in ruling on other key issues in the case, the court gave prosecutors two important victories.

The justices rejected a constitutional challenge to that part of the state’s capital punishment law that permits the death penalty to be imposed on convicted murderers who know or reasonably should know their victims were on-duty police officers.

‘Strike at Heart of System’

“Murders of this kind threaten the community at large by hindering the completion of vital public safety tasks,” Justice Joseph R. Grodin wrote for the court. “They evince a particular contempt for law and government, and they strike at the heart of a system of ordered liberty.”

The court also overruled a 1983 decision it had made that barred trial judges from making any comment on evidence or testimony after a jury reports that it is deadlocked. Judges may discuss the strength and relevance of such evidence, the justices said Thursday, so long as they are fair and they do not infringe on the fact-finding responsibilities of jurors.

The two rulings issued Thursday brought to 58 the number of death sentences the court has overturned out of 61 it has reviewed since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.

The rulings came less than two weeks before a bitterly contested state election in which three of the six court members on the ballot--Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Grodin--are under attack for rulings in capital cases. Bird has voted to reverse all 61 of the death sentences the court has considered.

In the other case decided Thursday, the court reversed the death-penalty conviction of a black defendant accused of murdering two whites, ruling that blacks had been improperly removed from the jury that tried the case.

The court, citing its own landmark 1978 decision and a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring discrimination in jury selection, found that the prosecution had removed all three black prospective jurors without providing a satisfactory answer to defense contentions that they were being excluded because of their race.

The trial judge compounded the error by failing to carefully evaluate the prosecution’s stated reasons for challenging the black jurors, the court said.

‘Patent Violation’

Removing the blacks from the jury panel represented a “patent violation” of a defendant’s right to a trial by a jury drawn from a cross-section of the community, the court said in an opinion by Justice Stanley Mosk.

The justices ordered a new trial for Melvin Turner, a parolee charged with the execution-style murders of Dr. George S. Hill Jr., a prominent surgeon, and Jo Ella Champion, a schoolteacher, in Torrance in 1979.

The prosecutor in the Turner case, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Martin, assailed the decision and said it may be very difficult to relocate witnesses and reassemble evidence he said would “overwhelmingly” prove Turner’s guilt at retrial.

“The justices seem to have a quiver of arrows,” Martin said. “They pull out different arrows for different cases. That’s what they’ve done here. They’re second-guessing the trial judge, who was in the best position to see whether excusal of the jurors was warranted.”

Martin emphasized that neither he nor other county prosecutors excluded jurors because they were members of certain racial, religious or other groups. There were other, non-racial, reasons for removing jurors in this case, he said.

‘Clearly Inadequate’

Deputy state Public Defender Steffan Imhoff, one of the attorneys who represented Turner on appeal, defended the decision, saying the prosecution’s stated reasons for excluding the black jurors were “clearly inadequate.”

“There is now widespread agreement, not only among legal authorities but the public as well, that in this day and age in California you can’t go around kicking all black people off juries,” Imhoff said.

Turner and another man, Teague Hampton Scott, were charged with the murders of Hill and Champion in a robbery at the Torrance Airport, where Champion, an amateur pilot, kept her plane. The victims were found bound, gagged and shot in the head in the airport hangar. Scott was tried separately, convicted and sentenced to prison.

At Turner’s trial, three blacks were called as prospective jurors but all three were removed by the prosecution through peremptory challenges, for which no cause ordinarily need be stated.

Must Convince Judge

Under the 1978 ruling, however, when one side makes a claim, valid on its face, that the other side is excluding jurors by reason of group bias alone, the other side must convince the judge that it is not doing so. And in this case, the defense charged the prosecution with improperly removing blacks to obtain an all-white jury.

According to the record in the case, the prosecutor, when asked by the judge to explain, said he excluded one juror, a truck driver, because he had had “a great deal of difficulty” answering questions and would not be suitable to sit in a complex case; a second juror, a hospital worker, because something in her work “would not be good” for the prosecution, and a third juror, because she had said that as a mother, she might become “too emotional” to try the case.

Sentenced to Death

The trial judge, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas Fredricks, accepted the prosecution’s explanations and Turner was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

Turner’s subsequent appeal was upheld in a 28-page opinion by Mosk, who observed that in the court’s 1978 decision and in subsequent cases, “we have made it clear that the courts of this state cannot tolerate the abuse of (juror) challenges to strip from a jury, solely because of a presumed group bias, all or most members of an identifiable group of citizens distinguished on racial, religious, ethnic or similar grounds.”

Mosk noted also that earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court, overruling a 21-year-old high court precedent, had held that purposely excluding jurors of the same race as the defendant violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

‘Suggestive of Bias’

The state court said the record of the case showed the prosecution’s explanations for excluding the jurors were “either implausible or suggestive of bias” and that the trial judge should have made a greater effort to evaluate “their genuineness and sufficiency.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Edward A. Panelli, joined by Justice Malcolm M. Lucas, said he “reluctantly agreed” that Turner’s conviction should be overturned. But he added that the trial judge had not clearly indicated to the prosecution that a more detailed explanation for removing the jurors was required.

In such instances, Panelli said, prosecutors understandably may be uncertain as to the necessity for justifying removal of jurors of a particular race.

Case Sent Back

In the other case decided Thursday, the court unanimously set aside the death sentence imposed on Luis Valenzuela Rodriguez for the murders of CHP Officers Roy Blecher and William Freeman, who were shot to death off of Interstate 80 west of Sacramento.

The justices said the trial judge had failed to make his own independent assessment of the evidence before upholding the jury’s recommendation for the death sentence. The court sent the case back to the trial judge “for prompt reconsideration” of whether death or life without parole was the proper sentence--and gave both sides the right to appeal that decision when it is made.

On a separate vote of 4 to 3, the court upheld Rodriguez’s conviction, rejecting a series of challenges made by his lawyers. Grodin’s 103-page majority opinion was joined by Justices Reynoso, Lucas and Panelli.

Conviction Upheld

The majority turned aside defense contentions that the statutory provision allowing the death penalty for intentionally killing an officer should be permitted only for defendants who actually know--rather than should know--that their victims were on-duty officers.

The court also refused to overturn the conviction because the trial judge had told jurors after they reported they were deadlocked that they might want to review the testimony of a key defense witness to decide whether she had testified accurately.

Its 1983 ruling barring any such comment must be overruled to permit some judicial commentary, the court said.

In dissent, Mosk, joined by Bird and Justice Allen E. Broussard, said it was unfair to allow judges to comment on the evidence to a jury that is deadlocked, and that Rodriguez’s conviction should be reversed as “a miscarriage of justice.”

Deputy state Atty. Gen. Ronald S. Matthias praised the court’s ruling as “enormously gratifying,” even though Rodriguez’s sentence was set aside, at least temporarily.

Matthias noted that the ruling on comment to juries would apply to a wide range of criminal cases--”from serious felonies to misdemeanors”--and that its ruling upholding the death penalty for killing an officer was a “very important” validation of capital punishment.

Rodriguez’s attorney was not immediately available for comment.