COUNTYWIDE : Kraft’s Sentencing Hearing Set Today

Before Randy Steven Kraft is formally sentenced to death, at a hearing scheduled to begin today, his lawyers are expected to ask for a new trial using the same arguments that may be the basis of his appeal for several more years.

Kraft, 44, a computer consultant from Long Beach, was condemned to death in August by the same jury which three months earlier had convicted him of the murder of 16 young men in Orange County between 1972 and 1983. The victims usually were hitchhikers, all between the ages of 18 and 25, and usually were found sexually abused or mutilated. Their bodies were dumped along freeways or in remote areas of the county.

Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin may reduce the sentence to life without parole. But no Orange County judge has set aside a jury’s death verdict under the state’s 12-year-old capital punishment law, and no one involved expects McCartin to be the first. The judge has already sentenced six men to die, and he is considered a strong advocate of the death penalty.

Kraft’s attorneys are scheduled to seek a new trial, and the most important issue will be McCartin’s decision to allow prosecutors to include all 16 murders at a single trial. Kraft’s lawyers have argued that no jury could avoid being biased against someone facing so many charges.

A side issue was that Kraft wanted to testify about five of the murders but not the others. When the judge refused to guarantee that he would limit cross-examination to the five murders, the defense decided not to put Kraft on the stand. That would not have happened, Kraft attorney William J. Kopeny argued, if his client had been granted separate trials.

Kopeny is also scheduled to argue today that Kraft was put in the unfair position of having to prove his innocence because the judge did not force prosecutors to prove each murder on its own merits.