Death Penalty Upheld for Man Who Killed Girl, 10 : Appeal: The state Supreme Court rejects claims that the defendant should not have been permitted to represent himself at trial in the murder of the child.

The state Supreme Court on Monday upheld the death sentence of a former ice cream vendor for the kidnaping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old Baldwin Park girl he lured into his truck in 1982.

The justices rejected claims by attorneys for Robert Edward Stansbury that he should not have been permitted to represent himself at trial, where he asked for the death penalty and refused to present personal background evidence that might have spared his life.

The court reaffirmed the right of mentally competent defendants to act as their own attorneys, even in capital cases. Stansbury, the justices said in an unsigned opinion, cannot claim that his refusal to present mitigating evidence now entitles him to a retrial.

In dissent, Justice Stanley Mosk, while agreeing that Stansbury’s conviction should be affirmed, argued that he should be afforded a new penalty trial. Stansbury’s trial tactics were the work of a “cunning fool” and helped seal his own fate, the justice said.

“I cannot find that our social interest in a reliable penalty verdict is safeguarded in a case in which none of the available evidence and no arguments are presented on the defendant’s behalf,” Mosk wrote.

Both a state prosecutor and a defense attorney in the case declined comment pending study of the court’s opinion.

Stansbury, 52, was sentenced to death for the murder of Robyn Leigh Jackson. He testified that she was one of the children he gave candy to as he drove his ice cream truck through the neighborhood.

According to the prosecution, Stansbury kidnaped the girl, raped her and threw her into a Pasadena flood control channel. Authorities said there was evidence that she was placed in an ice cream freezer before her death, and that she probably died when her head hit the concrete floor of the channel.

Stansbury was on parole at the time of the killing, having been convicted of sexually abusing two young boys and raping two women and a 14-year old girl.

At his request, Stansbury was permitted to act as co-counsel during his trial. He questioned jurors, presented evidence and argued legal points, assisted by two court-appointed attorneys and two law clerks. At one point he told jurors he would seek the death penalty if convicted, explaining that such a tactic would speed an appeal.

State law provides that capital appeals go directly to the state Supreme Court; a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole goes first to a state appellate court.

After he was convicted, Stansbury refused to present evidence of a harsh childhood and broken home that might have supported a sentence of life in prison rather than death. He also refused to argue that his life should be spared.

In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Stansbury shifted his legal course and argued that public policy against “state-assisted suicide” required the reversal of any death sentence where the defendant refuses to offer mitigating evidence and seeks the death penalty.

The high court disagreed, saying that the Constitution “teaches that we should accord the competent defendant, even in a capital case, this much control over his destiny.”

The fact that there is no mitigating evidence in the record to weigh in Stansbury’s behalf “is the defendant’s own doing, and he generally cannot be heard to complain of it here,” the court said.