New Trial to Open in Crash Deaths of 4 in Family : Crime: Appellate justices threw out the murder conviction but allowed the drunk-driving verdict to stand.

When an appellate court threw out the second-degree murder conviction of a drunk driver in the deaths of a Fullerton woman and her three children, the justices offered prosecutors two options:

They could retry the case or the appellate court would let Michael W. Reding stand convicted on lesser charges of vehicular manslaughter.

For Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael A. Jacobs, that was like no choice at all.

Reding’s new murder trial for the Oct. 23, 1984, deaths of 36-year-old Pamela Trueblood and her children--ages 11, 9, and 8--is scheduled to begin Wednesday before Superior Court Judge Dennis S. Choate.

“The first jury thought he was guilty of murder; the facts are the same; nothing’s changed,” Jacobs said.

Reding, now 33, was the first defendant in Orange County, and among the first in the state, to be convicted of murder in a vehicle-fatality case. New state Supreme Court guidelines at the time made it easier to seek second-degree murder in such cases.

Witnesses said Reding, traveling at least 70 m.p.h. in a 45-m.p.h. zone, began to pass a vehicle on the right. The two vehicles were traveling south at night on an isolated stretch of State College Boulevard in Fullerton. The Reding car then sharply cut back to the center divider, crossed it and struck the Trueblood car head-on. Trueblood had been returning from a gymnastics class at Cal State Fullerton.

Reding and two young children in the Trueblood car were injured. Killed besides Trueblood were her children, Eric, 11, Kerry, 9, and Scott, 8.

Reding, an engineer at Northrop Corp., protested that while he should be punished for what he did, it was unfair to make him the focal point for a public campaign against drunk drivers. Much of the publicity about the 1986 trial centered on the plight of Robert Trueblood, who lost his entire family in the crash. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) also called attention to the Reding case.

But Judge James. L. Smith, who sentenced Reding to 15 years to life in prison, disputed Reding’s claim.

“He is not a whipping boy who has been selected to make a point,” Smith said. “His conduct was grossly reprehensible. . . . He killed four people.”

The appellate court let stand Reding’s conviction for drunk driving. His blood-alcohol content was slightly above the 0.10 legal limit at the time.

But on the murder conviction, the justices said the trial judge should not have permitted prosecutor Jacobs to submit evidence that Reding also had a small amount of cocaine in his system. Reding denied that he had ingested any cocaine “that day.”

Jacobs had agreed to leave cocaine out of the case, but the trial judge, James L. Smith, allowed him to bring it up in rebuttal to Reding’s testimony. Jacobs said the lack of all cocaine evidence at the new trial should not affect the outcome.

But there are two new issues in dispute.

One is Reding’s testimony from the first trial. The other is the fact that the appellate justices let stand his drunk-driving conviction in the incident.

Jacobs wants the new jury to hear about both. Assistant Public Defender Michael P. Giannini wants both left out.

Although Giannini said he has not ruled out Reding’s testifying again, he wants the old testimony kept out “to preserve our options.” At the first trial, jurors reported that they were torn between the difference between second-degree murder and vehicular manslaughter. But it was after having Reding’s testimony reread, they said, that they agreed on a murder verdict.

Reding admitted that he had been drinking that night and that just before the crash had been fiddling with the tape player in his car.

Beyond the two legal issues under debate, Giannini has another problem in trying to get a jury to find Reding guilty of the lesser offense of vehicular manslaughter.

“This case involves such a terrible, terrible tragedy; you hope that the jurors can look at the facts and the law,” he said. “But they are only human. The truth is, what counts on a verdict is Mr. Reding’s state of mind. Tragic as it is, it should not be relevant that the victims were a mother and three children, instead of, say, a wanton criminal fleeing the scene of a crime.”

With vehicular manslaughter, a jury must find gross negligence by the driver. But in second-degree murder, the jury must find that a defendant knew his or her actions had a high probability in resulting in death.

The difference in Reding’s sentencing between second-degree murder could be great or slight, depending on the trial judge or the state corrections system. The murder conviction carries a sentence of 15 years to life; four vehicular manslaughter convictions could carry about 15 years, Giannini said.