Man Convicted of Murder in Slayings of 2 : Justice: But jurors refuse to return a multiple-murder finding, which would have meant an automatic life sentence without parole for a 26-year-old Orange man.

A 26-year-old Orange man was found guilty of first-degree murder Friday for his role in the slaying of two young people in Anaheim last year.

But jurors refused to return a multiple-murder finding, which would have meant an automatic life sentence without parole for the defendant, Charles Oscar Sabbath.

Jurors interviewed after the trial agreed that Sabbath was not the shooter and probably did not mean for the victims to get hurt. One juror, a schoolteacher, was so troubled by the verdict that she broke down in tears in the hallway and had to be helped to a seat.

Sabbath admitted in his testimony that he and a co-worker at a Riverside cabinet shop, John Jay Jordan, had robbed two acquaintances at their apartment on July 21, 1989, and tied them up. But Sabbath said that the victims were alive when he left and that Jordan must have returned afterward to kill them.

Ricardo Van Stubbs, 27, and Suzanne Elizabeth Rivera, 26, were found shot to death lying on a bed in their upstairs apartment on July 30, 1989, nine days after the shooting. Jordan, 27, faces a possible death penalty if convicted at his trial, which is still pending.

“It seems the law is incomplete,” the juror who had cried afterward told Sabbath’s attorney, Joel W. Baruch. “We knew under the law he (Sabbath) was guilty of murder. But if we voted that way, we knew he might get the same punishment as the (shooter). We really struggled with that.”

The juror asked that her name not be used and declined to discuss the case with reporters.

Several other jurors, who also asked not to be named, agreed that Sabbath was probably not involved in the shootings nor even in the apartment when it occurred. But they were skeptical of Sabbath’s testimony that he and Jordan had parted on the freeway, after which Jordan allegedly returned to the victim’s house in a separate car. Instead, they said, he was probably outside loading the victims’ truck that he was about to steal.

The jurors’ reaction is important to defense attorney Baruch. Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan has considerable leeway when he imposes sentence on Sabbath, scheduled for Sept. 7. The murder sentence is 25 years to life for each victim, but the judge could decide the sentences should run consecutively--one after another, which would be 50 years to life--instead of concurrently.

Baruch described his client as “a good kid” and said he may ask some jurors to return to testify for Sabbath at his sentencing.

“He is not a mean kid,” Baruch told some of the jurors. “He got involved, but he never expected something like this to happen.”

Sabbath’s parents and his sister, Wanda, who had flown in from Connecticut for the trial, hugged some of the jurors afterward and thanked them for their deliberations. Sabbath’s father, Charles Sr., a retired Navy veteran, shook hands with the prosecutor, Charles J. Middleton, and thanked him for a fair presentation of evidence.

Before he left the courtroom, he called out to his son, “Don’t hang your head down.”

But later, he was seen in a corner with his own head down, crying.

It was a case where the police had suspects even before they knew a crime had occurred. A Riverside Police Department detective learned from an informant that Jordan had confessed to him that he and Sabbath had just killed two people in Orange County. The detective began calling various Orange County police agencies to see whether they knew of any recent multiple murders, but it was several more days before the two victims were found.

Although Jordan told the informant that Sabbath had participated in the actual shooting, prosecutor Middleton said the evidence consistently points to Jordan as the only shooter.

Sabbath testified that he agreed to participate in the robbery because one of the victims, Stubbs, was in debt to him. Sabbath said he took Stubbs’ truck as a kind of ransom for what he was owed.

Some in the courtroom audience were confused about how Sabbath could be found guilty of two murders, yet win an “untrue” finding on the special-circumstance question of multiple murder. In California, jurors return a multiple-murder finding only if they believe that a defendant had an intent to kill.