Death Verdict Voided Over Invoking of Bible

A California prosecutor’s use of the Bible as part of his closing argument to the jury in a death penalty case denied a fair trial to a man who was convicted of killing the wife of a rival gang member in Los Angeles, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The decision means that Alfred Arthur Sandoval, 41, will get life in prison for the murder of Marlene Wells unless state officials appeal further or decide to hold a new trial on the issue of putting him to death.

At his trial in 1985, Sandoval was convicted of four murders. The jury gave him life sentences for three and imposed the death sentence for the killing of Wells.

The prosecutor in the case told jurors that executing Sandoval would be “doing what God says.” Sometimes, said Deputy Dist. Atty. David S. Milton, in a paraphrase from the New Testament, “God will destroy the body to save the soul.” Milton is now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge in Pomona.

An argument such as that “undercuts the jury’s own sense of responsibility for imposing the death penalty,” wrote Mary Schroeder of Phoenix, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges Michael D. Hawkins and Raymond Fisher joined the ruling. Schroeder is an appointee of President Jimmy Carter; Hawkins and Fisher were appointed by President Clinton.

Monday’s ruling stemmed from two incidents--the Oct. 14, 1984, shootings of Gilbert Martinez and Anthony Aceves at Belvedere Park, and the Oct. 31, 1984, shootings of Wells and her husband, Raymond Dale Wells. Sandoval, who is from Baldwin Park, previously served almost five years in state prison for attempted murder.

In 1993, the California Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for Sandoval, saying that although the prosecutor’s comments about the Bible were improper, they amounted to “harmless error.”

But the 9th Circuit disagreed, noting that the verdict was in doubt for several days, with the jury telling the trial judge at one point that it was evenly divided.

“We do not know what actually happened in the jury room, but we cannot assume that the prosecutor’s religious argument did not persuade at least one of the jurors to change a vote for life to death on the Marlene Wells count,” Schroeder wrote.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Jeffrey B. Kahan, who argued the appeal for the state, said he was disappointed at the outcome but could not say yet what the government’s next move would be.

“What the jury did was entirely consistent with the evidence--the killing of Marlene Wells was an aggravated and heinous act,” Kahan said. He stressed that the jury had singled out the Wells murder for a death verdict, even though the prosecutor’s invocation of the Bible had come in a closing argument seeking death on all four murders.

“Had there been a death verdict on all the people, it would have been a lot more difficult for us to argue that the prosecutor’s closing argument was ‘harmless error,’ ” Kahan said.

Manuel Araujo, one of Sandoval’s appellate lawyers, said he was “very happy that the court came out this way on this issue.” But he said he thought the ruling would not bring an end to the long-running case, predicting that the attorney general’s office would appeal further.

In his closing argument, Milton had been responding to Sandoval’s defense lawyer, who had urged the jury not to “play God” by sentencing Sandoval to death.

“You are not playing God. You are doing what God says,” Milton told the jurors. “This might be the only opportunity to wake him up. God will destroy the body to save the soul. Make him get himself right.”

Milton’s “argument was both improper and highly prejudicial,” the judges said. The argument “frustrated the purpose of closing argument, which is to explain to the jury what it has to decide and what evidence is relevant to its decision.”

“In a capital case like this one, the prosecution’s invocation of higher law or extra-judicial authority violates the 8th Amendment principle that the death penalty may be constitutionally imposed only when the jury makes findings under a sentencing scheme that carefully focuses on the specific factors it is to consider in reaching a verdict,” the judges said.

Several other courts have made similar rulings, the judges said, including a federal appeals court in Atlanta, which overturned a death sentence in 1991 because a prosecutor had compared the defendant to Judas Iscariot.