Child’s Killer Denied Parole After Board Sees Mother’s Video

After viewing an emotional videotape made by the mother of a toddler beaten to death 20 years ago, a parole board voted unanimously Monday to reject the killer’s parole bid.

On the tape, Joyce Finley said that her turmoil is undiminished two decades after the scalding and torture death of her 21-month-old son, Jesse. A three-person panel of the state Board of Prison Terms voted to reject the parole request of Finley’s former live-in boyfriend, Steven C. Sullivan.

The panel, chaired by Manuel C. Guaderrama, a retired San Diego deputy police chief, voted that Sullivan cannot have another parole hearing for four years, the maximum delay allowable.

Sullivan is incarcerated at the state prison in San Luis Obispo. Like many crime victims and families of crime victims, Finley could not bear the thought of traveling to the prison and confronting a prisoner who damaged her life.

Instead she took advantage of a program adopted 10 months ago by the San Diego County district attorney’s office that allows crime victims and their families to make videos to show at parole hearings for prisoners serving indeterminate sentences in state prison. There are 1,050 such prisoners from San Diego County.

The tapes are included with the paperwork forwarded by the district attorney’s office to parole commissioners. The goal of the videotapes, according to Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst, is to ensure that parole boards are reminded of the pain caused by criminals and to increase the chance that prisoners sentenced to life terms are never paroled.