Court Upholds Conviction of Killer High on Cocaine

A Spring Valley man, Francisco Urias Uriarte, was appropriately convicted of two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder in the 1987 shootings of four people, a state appellate court in San Diego ruled Monday.

Uriarte was high on cocaine and crazy in the common sense of that term but not legally insane when he killed two people and wounded two others Oct. 15, 1987, the 4th District Court of Appeal said.

The case pointed up the difficulty the legal system can encounter in criminal cases involving a defense based on a diminished mental state, said Justice Howard Wiener, who wrote the opinion. He said the case “appears to fall into a legal crack.”

Uriarte was convicted in March, 1989, of murdering Jeff Constantino, 37, and his wife, Nancy, 36, who were visiting a friend and neighbor of Uriarte’s at a Spring Valley apartment.

Uriarte went to the apartment of John Alva looking for his wife, who he believed was being held captive there. She actually was in a Tijuana hospital.

After being told she was not there, Uriarte, who was under the influence of cocaine, left, but returned to Alva’s apartment with a gun.

He opened fire on Jeff and Nancy Constantino, killing them both. He then shot and wounded Alva, who was trying to flee.

After leaving the complex, Uriarte shot and wounded another man in the neighborhood, Tom Eberwein.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Bernard Revak sentenced Uriarte in April, 1989, to the maximum possible term, 38 years to life in prison.

According to psychiatrists who testified at his trial, Uriarte’s mental state at the time of the killings was marked by delusions and was a “temporary cocaine psychosis” that would generally last as long as the cocaine did. Any insanity dissipated as the cocaine itself dissipated, the psychiatrists said.

Uriarte claimed that he honestly--if unreasonably--believed the killings were necessary to prevent harm to his wife. But, Wiener said, even if Uriarte thought his wife was in danger, that did not justify the use of lethal force, because it was not clear that Uriarte believed the harm to his wife was imminent.

And though Uriarte may have been delusional, that did not amount to legal insanity, so his conviction could not be reversed, Wiener said.

Though Uriarte was “concedely ‘crazy’ ” in the ordinary sense of that word, he was without a legal defense, Wiener said, and the case fell into a “legal crack.”

Under a “more enlightened” legal definition of insanity, Uriarte might be “legally as well as colloquially insane,” Wiener said. But courts, he said, are bound to work “within the present system with its present limitations.”

Justices Don R. Work and Charles W. Froehlich Jr. concurred in the opinion.