Death Penalty Delays Cloud a Father’s Life

Although nearly 12 years have passed since his daughter’s murder, Harold Jackson thinks every day about Robyn and the man who raped and beat the 10-year-old and stuffed her into an ice cream truck cooler.

Jackson visits her grave in Glendora three or four times a week when his route as a photocopier repairman takes him nearby. And he keeps photos of the girl--who would be a young woman now--close at hand, along with some of her stuffed animals and a letter she wrote to him just days before her body was found in a flood-control channel in Pasadena.

“It is still pretty fresh,” said Jackson, 45, who lives in Colton. “Maybe more like it was two years ago instead of almost 12.”

Some days, the memories are more painful than usual. Those are the days, Jackson says, when the legal system produces what he sees as yet another delay in the execution of Robyn’s killer, Robert Edward Stansbury.

Tuesday was one of those days. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Stansbury’s death penalty conviction should be reviewed again by the state high court.

“It’s very upsetting,” Jackson said of Tuesday’s ruling. “I would like to see this guy in the ground. I know the rest of the family feels that way too. We would all like to see it done and over with.”

Anthony Robusto, the Glendora attorney who represented Stansbury in the 1985 trial, declined comment Tuesday on whether Stansbury deserves the death penalty under current California law.

The Washington decision does not necessarily mean that Stansbury will be freed or spared the gas chamber. The California Supreme Court may conclude that police did not err when they failed to immediately inform Stansbury of his right to remain silent when they first questioned him about Robyn in September, 1982. Stansbury was read his Miranda rights about 30 minutes after the interrogation began.

But Jackson remains fearful that Stansbury’s 1985 conviction might be overturned. “I’m deeply concerned that he is going to pull something out of his hat and suddenly get free again,” he said. “I think if they let this guy go, I would almost feel compelled to hunt him down.”

At the time of her murder, Robyn Leigh Jackson was living with her mother, a brother and two half-brothers in Baldwin Park. Jackson, who was divorced from Robyn’s mother and had remarried, was living in North Carolina. He returned to Southern California the day after her body was discovered, stayed through the trial and never left.

Costa Mesa Police Chief Dave Snowden also had an emotional response to the court ruling Tuesday. Snowden, who was Baldwin Park police chief during the Jackson murder case, recalled the horror of watching Robyn’s autopsy. He stressed that Stansbury previously had been convicted of two rapes at gunpoint in the San Gabriel Valley.

“In the forefront of my mind is what this vicious animal did to this poor little girl and what he did to other people,” said Snowden, who insists that his officers did not violate Stansbury’s rights in 1982. If Stansbury goes free, he added, “it will be another in a long line of other injustices to victims.”

Robyn’s mother, Sharon Sanchez, reportedly lives in Missouri and could not be reached for comment. Robyn’s older brother, Scott, recently became a father himself and is on Army duty in Georgia, Harold Jackson said.

“He doesn’t like to think about it,” Jackson said of his son’s memories of the murder.

But Harold Jackson is stunned, he said, by each turn in what seems to him an endless chain of Stansbury appeals. “The only way to put this aside,” Jackson said quietly, “is his death sentence.”