U.S. to Seek Death Sentence for Guard’s Accused Killer

The U.S. attorney’s office said Wednesday that it will seek the death penalty for an inmate accused of fatally stabbing a guard and wounding four others last year at the Lompoc federal penitentiary.

If the trial of Roy C. Green proceeds as planned, it will be the first death penalty case tried in Los Angeles federal court since Congress reinstated capital punishment at the federal level in 1988.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno must approve any decision by local federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty. That approval was granted last week, a spokesman at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said.

Green’s court-appointed lawyer, Joseph Walsh, declined to comment on Reno’s action.

The 40-year-old defendant is accused of stabbing Officer Scott Williams in the neck with a makeshift knife that Green concealed in his clothing while being escorted from his cell April 3, 1997. Williams bled to death within moments. He was 29 and left a wife and two children.

Four other officers were wounded in the attack.

Green, scheduled to go on trial in April, has a long history of violent crimes. At the time of the stabbings, he was serving a 26-year sentence for cocaine trafficking and assaulting two guards at a federal lockup in Oxford, Wis.

In its formal notice to the court that it intends to seek the death penalty, the U.S. attorney’s office said that in April, Green threatened to kill a guard at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he is now being held. In May, prosecutors said, Green fashioned two knives out of a metal soap dish and plastic light cover, again threatening to kill corrections officers.

Green’s criminal history dates to the late 1970s, when he was convicted in Los Angeles Superior Court of attempted murder, robbery and burglary. He was found guilty a month later of assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.

In their notice to the court, Assistant U.S. Attys. Patricia Donahue and Benjamin Jones said Green is an incorrigible criminal who has shown no remorse for his misdeeds.

They said Officer Williams’ wife and two daughters have been devastated by his death.

Only one other Los Angeles federal court case has come close to being tried as a capital crime in recent years.

Rather than risk the death penalty, however, Edward Stanley Jr., the leader of an interstate drug trafficking ring, and an associate, Daniel Ray Bennett, pleaded guilty last year to murder-for-hire charges and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Federal death penalty defendants are permitted by law to plead guilty in exchange for a life term without parole.

The last Los Angeles death penalty case approved by the attorney general before Stanley’s and Bennett’s was in the late 1960s, when two marijuana smugglers were charged with kidnapping and executing two Border Patrol agents. The defendants pleaded guilty and received life sentences.

A check of newspaper clippings turned up only one case in the past half-century in which a defendant received the death penalty after a trial in Los Angeles federal court.

In 1950, Tomoya Kawakita was sentenced to die in the electric chair after he was convicted of treason for beating and torturing American prisoners of war forced to work in Japanese munitions plants during World War II. The sentence was never carried out and, years later, Kawakita received a presidential pardon.

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 1972 unless defendants were assured of procedural safeguards. Congress did not pass legislation with the legally required safeguards for federal cases until 1988.

Fewer than 20 federal convicts are now awaiting execution, including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.