Deadlocked Jury Splits 7-5 in Triple Murder Case : Courts: The prosecutor has not decided whether he will seek a new penalty phase trial for Daniel Duffy in the county’s longest-running criminal case.

Orange County’s longest-running criminal case failed to come to a conclusion Friday, when a Superior Court jury deadlocked over whether to send a convicted triple-murderer to the gas chamber.

Jurors told Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary that they were split 7-5 in favor of recommending a death sentence for Daniel Duffy.

Loella H. Blanas of Stanton, who was among the seven who voted for death, said: “We felt he was guilty. Any murder in my opinion is terrible and that’s what it was.”

Another juror, Julia R. Roberts of Buena Park, said she voted for life without parole largely because of testimony from Duffy’s two sisters “and the fact that he has such a good record in the Orange County jail for the past eight years.”

Roberts also cited “some emotional feelings on my part” regarding the death penalty.

A third juror, who asked not to be identified, said that until the final balloting, the vote was 8-4 in support of the death penalty.

On July 10, the same jury convicted the 47-year-old former motorcycle gang member of three counts of first-degree murder for his role in the 1980 Memorial Day triple slaying in Westminster. The bodies of the victims--Richard Rizzone, 36; his girlfriend, Rena Miley, 19, and Thomas Monahan, 28--were found in Rizzone’s tract home.

In 1984, Duffy and Thomas Maniscalco, founder of the Hessian motorcycle gang, were arrested in connection with the killings and held in the Orange County jail. They have been in the facility longer than any other inmates.

Maniscalco’s 1990 trial on the same first-degree murder charges lasted 17 months, making it the longest in Orange County history. That trial, which cost the county several million dollars, ended in a mistrial when jurors deadlocked 10-2 in favor of a conviction after deliberating 22 days.

Prosecutors had planned to retry Maniscalco after Duffy’s trial.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard M. King said, “I am not disappointed at all by the verdict in this penalty phase,” preferring to praise jurors for returning a guilty verdict on all counts after less than three days of deliberating in the trial’s earlier phase.

“They should be complimented for that decision,” King said. “I wish I could have this jury hear the Maniscalco trial,” the prosecutor said. “They worked extremely hard in both phases.”

The prosecutor said he has not decided whether to ask for a new penalty phase trial when he returns to court August 20.

If Duffy is retried, a new jury will be impaneled to decide whether he will receive the death penalty or life without parole. In order to make that decision, prosecutors would present a substantial amount of the evidence heard by the jurors who determined Duffy to be guilty, which King estimated could take six months.

Duffy’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Michael P. Giannini, also chose to focus on the jury’s guilty verdict. During the trial, defense lawyers argued that Duffy was never present at the crime scene. He was prosecuted, they said, merely because of his close ties with Maniscalco.

Giannini said that even though Duffy had escaped a death verdict in this trial, “it’s hard for him to be in a celebratory mood. (Life without parole) is better than death, but he’s still reeling from the guilty verdict.”

As a defense attorney, Giannini called the deadlock “a very remarkable verdict in light of the jury’s belief that (Duffy) was guilty of three murders. . . . They must have believed his life has a great deal of value.”