Despite Objections, Judge Sets Date for Thompson to Die

Thomas Martin Thompson will be executed Aug. 5, a judge ordered Friday, even though the convicted murderer and rapist has gained support from seven former prosecutors and others who argue that he does not deserve to die.

In a stern, almost steely voice, Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald ordered the execution 14 years after he sentenced Thompson to death.

Thompson, 42, was convicted in 1983 of raping and stabbing 20-year-old Ginger Fleischli in his Laguna Beach apartment and leaving her to bleed to death. Prosecutor Michael A. Jacobs said he has no doubt that Thompson should die for the crime and that those who argue to the contrary are “grandstanding.”

“With this reaching the end of litigation and the death penalty looming, a lot of people start making clearly untrue allegations to get publicity at the expense of someone else’s case,” Jacobs said of the former prosecutors. “They clearly don’t know the facts.”

Fleischli’s brother, Jack Fleischli, would not comment Friday but had said previously that he and other family members were eager to see Thompson pay the ultimate price for the slaying.

The defense argued that the actual killer was Fleischli’s ex-boyfriend, David Leitch, who is serving a prison sentence for helping to dispose of her body.

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Leitch, Thompson and Fleischli were friends at the time and had gone for pizza on Balboa Island the evening of the murder. Fueled by beer, whiskey, rum and hashish, the threesome barhopped in Laguna Beach, police said.

Afterward, defense attorneys said, Fleischli and Thompson had consensual sex in the apartment that Thompson shared with Leitch, and Thompson fell asleep.

Three days later, Fleischli’s body was found in a shallow grave at an Irvine nursery. She had been raped and stabbed five times, said prosecutors, who argued that Thompson murdered her to cover up the rape.

Gregory A. Long, who represents Thompson now, said his client has always maintained his innocence. Defense attorneys said Leitch, who had an on-again, off-again romance with Fleischli, had a motive to kill and had once threatened her.

Also, Leitch’s shoe prints were found near the shallow grave.

In appeals, the defense argued that Thompson was denied a fair trial because his attorney at the time failed to wage an aggressive fight against the rape charge, which made Thompson eligible for the death penalty. Richard A. Gadbois Jr., U.S. district judge in Los Angeles, overturned the rape conviction in 1995, but that decision was later reversed in a federal appeals court.

Thompson’s attorneys also said that the defense attorney failed to challenge the credibility of two key jailhouse informants who had reputations for trading information for favorable treatment. They also questioned prosecution testimony by Leitch’s ex-wife.

“We’re certainly going to file a petition of clemency with Gov. Wilson,” Long said outside the courtroom Friday.

Thompson also has won the support of seven former prosecutors who signed a friend-of-the-court brief suggesting that prosecutors in the case offered inconsistent versions of the same crime in the trials of Thompson and Leitch.

“Our adversarial system has not produced a fair and reliable result,” the former prosecutors wrote.

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In 45 days, at one minute after midnight, Thompson is set to receive a lethal injection in San Quentin’s death chamber unless Wilson grants clemency, which he has never done before, or if defense attorneys are able to delay the execution by securing a new trial, attorneys said.

More than 400 inmates are now on California’s death row. Four men have been executed since 1992, when the state reinstated the death penalty.

Holly Wilkens of the state’s attorney general’s office said that, because Thompson’s legal appeal options have been exhausted, there’s “considerably greater burden” on the defense to delay the execution.

“We don’t know what his 11th-hour petition will be, but we do know that he faces greater obstacles now,” Wilkens said.