After 14 Years, Who Does the Victim’s Family Appeal to?

When Kay Brenneman heard Thursday that the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for execution in the Thompson case out of Orange County, she was pleased for the victim’s family. But there was a little sadness, too.

She’d like to see some movement on the other Orange County Thompson case.

The death sentence for Tommy Thompson, reinstated by the high court this week, gained national attention last year after Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Roman Catholic archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese, publicly took up the defendant’s cause. But Robert Jackson Thompson has been on death row for more than 14 years--a year longer than Tommy. And his appeal is far from over, plodding along in near anonymity.

Robert Thompson, now 50, was convicted of the Aug. 25, 1981, murder of 12-year-old newspaper carrier Benjamin Brenneman of Anaheim. That’s right, Kay’s son.

Thompson’s appellate attorney, Paul Gabbert of Santa Monica, told me that in the seven years he’s been assigned to the case, he’s not had a single inquiry from anyone in the media. So naturally, he was suspicious of my motives.

“Reporters tend to want to focus on the length of an appeal rather than look at its merits,” Gabbert said.

Maybe so. But next fall Thompson’s appeal will be in its 15th year. At what point are we allowed to say: This is getting ridiculous. If a trial takes under a year, should it take more than 15 times that long to decide if the trial was fair? Especially for a defendant who all but confessed?

True, Robert Jackson Thompson did not admit killing Benjamin Brenneman. But he admitted kidnapping the boy when he knocked on his door to try to sell him a newspaper subscription. He admitted sexually abusing the boy. He admitted tying him up and forcing him into a tiny trunk for a trip to an empty field on the Palos Verdes peninsula. Gee, he was alive when I left him hogtied with a rope around his neck, Thompson said. What could have happened?

The shock of this Thompson case at the time was that the defendant had only been out of prison three months when he attacked Benjamin. He’d served a three-year sentence for child molestation.

One argument worthy of pursuit was whether Thompson’s pedophilia meant he deserved a hospital bed instead of a seat in the gas chamber. But Justice Marcus M. Kaufman addressed that when the state Supreme Court rejected Thompson’s appeal in 1990:

“Society is not compelled to suffer forcible sexual predations upon its children by depraved repeat offenders.”

That decision was eight years ago. After that the Thompson case moved to the U.S. District Court level. Which is where it remains.

It has yet to make it to the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, or the U.S. Supreme Court. The Tommy Thompson case has already reached those two levels twice. If the Tommy Thompson case is any indication, we’re at least five years away from seeing the Robert Jackson Thompson appeal resolved.

Even if no one party is responsible for any undue delay, it doesn’t make it easier when you are the victim’s mother. Kay Brenneman just wants the nightmare over. Seems reasonable enough to me.

“When Thompson was sentenced to death, I knew the appeal would take years, maybe even seven or eight,” she said. “But this? Who could ever be prepared to live with it this long?”

As a reporter I covered the Robert Jackson Thompson trial. It’s easy to recall Thompson making an obscene gesture with his finger throughout his entire sentencing hearing. I had written about Kay Brenneman at the trial: “She was always surrounded by friends. Yet she always seemed so vulnerable, so overwhelmed by the system.”

She’s changed a great deal since then.

Brenneman had already lost one son, as a baby, to cystic fibrosis. Her daughter, Judy, though fine now, had to endure two heart surgeries before she was out of her toddler years. It made Kay Brenneman a protective mother. You can imagine her panic when Benjamin didn’t come home from his paper route and his bicycle was found abandoned.

She had to go through two trials--the first jury hung 9 to 3 for death. Since then, she’s made Thompson’s case her cause.

Clerks at the state Supreme Court once confirmed that Brenneman called them daily for months while she waited for a decision. She actively campaigned for the removal of Chief Justice Rose Bird and two others from the state Supreme Court. One irony is that Gabbert, Thompson’s attorney, claims the case was delayed three years because of the success of that 1986 campaign against Bird and her anti-death penalty court. It was taken off the docket while the newly configured court addressed other weighty issues.

She’s endured other sad days since the trial: Her marriage ended in divorce, and a car accident left her permanently disabled. Kay Brenneman’s life now revolves around her two grandsons, Judy’s kids. And keeping in touch with the attorney general’s office for news of Thompson’s case. She wonders what issues could be left after all these years.

It’s interesting that one of them is “ineffectiveness of counsel.” That was the same claim in the Tommy Thompson case. And in both cases, it was the same lawyer, Ron Brower of Santa Ana.

In the Robert Thompson case, Brower somehow convinced three jurors to give his client a penalty less than the death sentence. Given the facts, seems to me that’s some mighty effective counsel. Other issues on appeal concern Thompson’s statements to detectives. Admittedly, they tricked him. They claimed they could prove his tire tracks were at the site where the body was found (not true). But that’s just good Jack Webb detective tactics. The state Supreme Court thought so too.

In all, attorney Gabbert says he has 31 issues for the U.S. District Court to look at. And he is scheduled to file more briefs on Monday. Sounds like Kay Brenneman had better be prepared to wait a good while longer.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com