Execution Plea Adds Twist to Tangled Case : Slayings: Judge who was ready to impose sentence under court-ordered deadline is confounded by convict’s request.

A judge who seemed ready to reduce the death sentence of a man convicted of executing two highway patrolmen in 1978 became flustered Friday when the convicted murderer asked that the judge impose the ultimate penalty.

The strange turn of events further complicated what may already be the state’s most convoluted death penalty case. Superior Court Judge Joseph Karesh might be forced to give up control of the case for not deciding by next week whether to impose a death sentence or life in prison without parole. A state Court of Appeal imposed the deadline because Karesh has been under order for five years to either affirm or overturn a jury recommendation that Luis Rodriguez be sentenced to death. Such a determination is usually done after the trial, which in this case ended in 1981.

But Friday, as 16 sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen looked on, Karesh said that he needs another two weeks to weigh the fate of Rodriguez, who has been on Death Row for 10 years for murdering CHP Officers William Freeman and Roy Blecher outside Sacramento three days before Christmas, 1978.

“Here, I came all prepared, with the decision all written out,” Karesh said. But while he described himself as a very decisive man, Karesh noted that Rodriguez’s request posed a dilemma that he had never faced in his 30 years on the bench.

Addressing the judge, Rodriguez emphasized that he was not asking for a death sentence because he wants to die in the gas chamber. Rather, he said, he is afraid that if he is sentenced to life without parole he will be transferred to the Pelican Bay prison in Del Norte County, perhaps the state’s highest-security facility, and that his case will languish longer in state courts.

“I think I would rather die,” said Rodriguez, who says he was only 145 pounds when arrested but is pumped up like a champion bodybuilder from years of lifting weights in prison.

With his lawyer, Dennis Riordan, Rodriguez told Karesh that a death sentence will give him a better chance of being heard in federal courts, where he is confident he would win a new trial. He maintains that his girlfriend, the chief prosecution witness, was the killer.

Karesh presided over the trial, which was moved to San Mateo County because of heavy media attention in Yolo County, where the crimes occurred. Lawmen sold “Adios Louis” T-shirts, adorned with a hangman’s noose, to raise money for the dead men’s families. A jury convicted Rodriguez of both murders and recommended the death penalty.

The judge agreed that he does not believe much of the girlfriend’s testimony, and has suggested that there is no prosecution case without her testimony.

“I had my opinion on the penalty a long time ago,” Karesh said. But noting that Riordan has requested that his client receive a life sentence, Karesh asked: “What do I do? Who do I listen to?”

After the bizarre hearing, Yolo County Dist. Atty. David Henderson, trying to hang on to a decade-old guilty verdict that grows more tenuous, left the San Mateo County courtroom shaking his head in disbelief and saying, “This is a joke.”

Convinced that Karesh is unable to decide Rodriguez’s fate, Henderson said afterward that he may try to have Karesh removed from the case.

For all the delay, Rodriguez’s case once moved fairly rapidly through the appellate courts. The California Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird all but affirmed the case in 1986 in one of its final acts before voters turned out three justices.

By a 4-3 vote, the high court had directed that Karesh simply comply with the law by making an independent determination that the jury’s verdict and death recommendation were proper, and asked that Karesh make a prompt decision.

Five years and a mass of litigation later, Karesh is still deciding the point.

In 1989, Riordan persuaded Karesh to throw out the conviction based on alleged juror misconduct. Henderson appealed, and in a stinging decision, a court of appeal reversed the ruling. It cited Karesh’s “excessive delay” and directed that if he is unwilling or unable to act by a deadline--Monday by Henderson’s calculation--he would be deemed unavailable and the case handed to another judge. Karesh has disputed that deadline.