Prosecutor Urges Death Penalty for Officer’s Killer

In a courtroom packed with police officers, a prosecutor urged jurors Wednesday to impose the death penalty on Kenneth Gay and called him a “coldblooded, sadistic killer” who shot down an officer 17 years ago in Lake View Terrace to evade arrest.

“To allow this defendant to walk out of here with any punishment less than death is to reward him,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Morrison said during his closing argument at Gay’s penalty phase retrial.

“He’s sitting here alive in the courtroom. Paul Verna is a memory,” Morrison said, motioning to a large photo of the slain officer and to a bullet-ridden black jacket Verna wore when he was gunned down in 1983.

The more than 30 officers in the courtroom audience, most of them in uniform, included Verna’s former colleagues and his son, Bryce, who sat next to his mother, Sandy.

Gay was convicted in 1985 of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but the California Supreme Court in 1998 overturned his sentence, citing incompetent counsel. However, it left the guilty verdict intact.

Because Gay’s guilt is not at issue, the jury can only recommend death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors said Gay, 42, shot Verna after the officer stopped the car he was in because Gay feared arrest as an ex-convict out on parole. Another passenger in the car, Raynard Cummings, fired first and then passed the gun to Gay, who then shot Verna five more times at close range, prosecutors said. Cummings was also convicted of first-degree murder and sent to death row in 1985. His case is now on appeal.

During the trial, Gay’s defense attorneys tried to introduce evidence they said would show that Cummings fired all six shots, but Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt excluded all evidence that would challenge the verdict of the 1985 jury, which found that Gay personally used a firearm.

On Wednesday, Morrison recited Gay’s history of violence, which included a firebombing that left an ex-girlfriend badly burned, the beating of another ex-girlfriend and the pistol-whipping of one robbery victim so hard that the gun broke. Morrison called Gay “a man without remorse.”

“You see before you a convicted killer. Nothing you have heard in this courtroom raises the slightest doubt,” Morrison said. “The only proper penalty is death.”

The defense’s closing argument is scheduled to begin today.