Buono Challenge to Void Murder Conviction Fails

The state Supreme Court on Thursday refused to set aside the conviction of Angelo Buono in the grisly murders of nine young women in the Hillside Strangler case.

The justices, in a brief order, declined to hear Buono’s challenge to a ruling last November by a state Court of Appeal that rejected his contention he had been denied a fair trial.

Buono was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1977 and 1978 murders. His cousin and accomplice, Kenneth Bianchi, pleaded guilty to five of the murders and two other killings in Washington and is serving a life sentence in that state.

In other criminal cases Thursday, the state high court upheld the death sentences of two convicted murderers, including one case in which the prosecution removed all blacks, Asians and Jews from the panel of prospective jurors.

The justices, by a vote of 5 to 2, affirmed the sentence of Andrew Edward Robertson for the stabbing deaths of two young women in San Bernardino County in 1977. The court in 1982 had overturned a previous sentence of death and ordered a new penalty trial for Robertson.

In another 5-2 decision, the court upheld the conviction and sentence of James Willis Johnson for the murder of a Milpitas jewelry store owner during a 1980 robbery.

The court, in a majority opinion by Justice Edward A. Panelli, rejected Johnson’s contention that the prosecution improperly removed minority jurors from the case, depriving him of the right to trial by a jury reflecting a fair cross-section of the community.

Under previous rulings by the state high court and the U.S. Supreme Court, challenges to any prospective jurors are permissible, so long as they are made on individual grounds and do not reflect bias against an entire racial or religious group.

The justices upheld the trial judge’s finding that the prosecution had offered acceptable reasons for excusing each of the jurors for specific reasons, such as apparent prejudice against policemen or disapproval of the death penalty.

However, in an unusual 83-page dissent, Justice Stanley Mosk, joined by Justice Allen E. Broussard, said the majority was retreating from previous rulings designed to guard against group bias in jury selection. Mosk urged Johnson’s lawyers to press the issue in further appeals to the federal courts.

Mosk noted that the prosecutor, in defending his challenge to four Jewish jurors, had denied prejudice by asserting, among other things, that he had often entertained Jews in his home and that “some of the more diligent prosecutors in our office” are Jews.

“This ritual recitation of the hoary excuse, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish,’ is obviously insufficient as a matter of law,” Mosk observed.

In the Buono case, lawyers for the defendant contended that the appellate court improperly rejected his challenge to the credibility of testimony by Bianchi that implicated Buono.

The appeal panel found that Bianchi’s testimony was “abundantly corroborated” by independent evidence that was sufficient itself to support Buono’s conviction.

The panel, in an opinion by Appellate Justice Lynn D. Compton, conceded that it might seem improbable that anyone could be capable of the brutality of the crimes at issue.

“Yet it is certain that Bianchi and one other person were so capable,” wrote Compton. “Once such a premise is accepted, and its validity is neither challenged nor rationally susceptible to challenge on the record before us, the probability that (Buono) was that other person is an essentially inescapable conclusion.”

Lawyers for Buono, noting that 1,300 pages of briefs had been filed before the appeal court, said the panel, in its 29-page opinion, had “not adequately or fairly addressed” virtually any of the issues raised by Buono.