LOS ANGELES : State High Court Upholds Death Sentence for Killer

The state Supreme Court in San Francisco ruled for the second time Monday that a Los Angeles man was properly sentenced to death for four murders, rejecting defense claims of tainted testimony by a jailhouse informant.

The court had upheld Stanley Williams’ convictions and death sentence in 1988, based on the trial record. Williams’ lawyer then filed another appeal, saying new evidence showed that police had illegally used an informant to pry incriminating statements from Williams.

But the court said the most damaging statements by Williams, about a plan to escape after killing two guards and a witness, were made to the informant with no prompting by officers and were properly admitted as evidence.

The informant, James Oglesby, may have been acting as a police agent when he questioned Williams at later dates, the court said. Police use of an informant to question a jailed inmate violates the inmate’s constitutional right to have a lawyer present during questioning and invalidates the evidence.

But on those occasions, the court said, Williams only discussed modifications of the escape plot, and “we can confidently say that the jury would have returned the same verdict of death” if jurors had never heard those statements from the informant.