Jury Urges Death Penalty for Killer of 2 Compton Officers

A Superior Court jury Friday recommended that reputed gang member Regis Deon Thomas be put to death for killing Compton Police Officers Kevin Michael Burrell and James Wayne MacDonald in February, 1993.

One juror in the Downtown courtroom sobbed audibly and most of the panel looked pale and shaken as their unanimous recommendation in the penalty phase of the trial was read after more than eight days of deliberations.

Thomas, who turned 25 on Friday, took the news unflinchingly, only glancing back to the audience where his wife sat with one of their six children, a 5-year-old boy. California law permits Thomas to choose how he dies--in the gas chamber or by lethal injection.

Superior Court Judge Edward A. Ferns will announce the final verdict July 14. Judges rarely overturn a jury’s decision to execute.

“Hopefully, there will be some closure now,” said Compton Police Chief Hourie Taylor, whose department has grieved openly over the first on-duty murders of officers in its history. “But it still doesn’t bring back those officers.”

Against the backdrop of intense public skepticism about the jury system, there was a feeling of victory among prosecutors and police investigators involved in the Thomas case. Many cited Friday’s verdict as an example of how the jury system can work, and how 12 strangers can agree with one another.

“There is justice,” Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said at a news conference after the verdict. “The jury system works most of the time.” He ended the conference abruptly when reporters began asking questions about the O.J. Simpson case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mark Arnold, who was put on the case hours after Burrell and MacDonald were gunned down during a seemingly routine traffic stop, said: “Someone deserved to die for this.”

Jurors left the building silently as a group, flanked by bailiffs who hustled them down a private exit. Arnold said the juror who cried as the verdict was being read began the case believing that Thomas was framed, but was overwhelmed by evidence that Thomas had killed both officers after they stopped his car.

Thomas’ family, lingering outside the courtroom after the hearing, said the case was one of mistaken identity and proves the legal system’s flaws. Thomas is keeping his spirits up and will fight the verdict, his family said. State law provides for automatic appeals in every death penalty case.

Thomas’ wife, Deshaunna Cody Thomas, carrying a bag of her husband’s clothes and watching her son run in a circle around her, said she expects Thomas to be exonerated.

“I’m telling him his daddy will be home someday,” she said.

Testimony by Thomas’ family during the penalty phase described him as a young, unemployed man living a life filled with contradictions.

His wife said her husband was devoted to his children and respected women. And yet she acknowledged he had fathered two additional children with two other women, and that he spent a couple of nights each week away from home.

At the time of his arrest Thomas had been out of work for a year, since the liquor store where he was a security guard burned down during the 1992 riots. Yet he drove a new truck and freely gave money to his children and their mothers. At one sidebar conference, prosecutors suggested that Thomas was dealing drugs, but they introduced no evidence to prove that.

In an effort to show that Thomas was shaped by forces beyond his control, his lawyers questioned his mother during the penalty phase about her past cocaine use. She described it as “a hobby, not a habit.”

She said that Thomas, the oldest of four children, grew up in South-Central Los Angeles without a father, and that she started using cocaine when he was 6 years old.

After Thomas discovered her drug use, “he got a little meaner than he was,” the mother said. “He didn’t feel nobody loved him so he didn’t care.”

Judge Ferns issued unusual orders attempting to constrain news coverage throughout the case. He ordered reporters not to print the names of three witnesses to the killing and forbade them to contact members of the victims’ or Thomas’ families after the jury’s guilty verdict. Ferns contended that these family members might be called as witnesses during the penalty phase. During the penalty phase, the judge ordered the news media not to name 12 members of Thomas’ family who testified in open court.

On Friday, as he prepared to release the jury, Ferns berated the media for its intense coverage of the Simpson trial while paying far less attention to cases like the deaths of Burrell and MacDonald.

“When you read the newspapers or watch television, you would think there’s only one case in L.A. County,” he said. “And that’s what makes the system, and the media coverage, almost a farce.”