Court Upholds Death Penalty in Murders

The California Supreme Court upheld a death sentence for a Los Angeles man Monday even though his defense lawyer failed to call a single witness in the sentencing portion of his trial.

The state high court decided 5 to 2 that evidence of the defendant’s tragic childhood and abuse in racist Alabama prisons would not have been enough to convince a jury to fix punishment at life imprisonment instead of death for triple murder.

Records of the trial contain “no indication the jury was inclined to sentence [Jesse James Andrews] to life imprisonment,” Justice Janice Rogers Brown wrote for the court.

Justices Joyce L. Kennard and Carlos Moreno dissented, arguing that a jury might have voted for life had it been told of Andrews’ time in brutal and racist penal institutions in the South, including prisons later found to impose cruel and unusual punishment and juvenile facilities likened to slave camps.

Andrews’ “attorneys did virtually no penalty phase preparation,” Kennard wrote. “They presented no expert witnesses. Nor did they ask their investigators to do any work on the penalty phase.”

Troubled by that failure, the state high court appointed Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jacqueline A. Connor in 1990 to examine the kind of evidence that could have been presented by the defense and prosecution.

Based on Connor’s findings, the state high court said defense lawyer Gerald Lenoir, assisted by Halvor Miller, presented a “reasonable case” for sparing Andrews’ life.

The lack of mitigating evidence made it unnecessary for the prosecution to introduce damaging testimony that would have depicted Andrews as “aggressive and desensitized to violence,” Brown wrote.

“Counsel here did perform some background investigation, including an interview with petitioner’s mother despite his objection,” Brown wrote, “after which they pursed a different penalty defense.”

Andrews was convicted of murdering two men and one woman during a drug-related robbery in Los Angeles in 1979. He also raped and sodomized his female victim. After jurors found him guilty of the crimes, they were asked to determine whether he should be sentenced to life or death.

The defense team during the penalty phase argued that Andrews was “a follower rather than violently antisocial” and urged the jury to consider the fact that “others who had committed more heinous multiple murders had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole,” the court majority said.

Among the evidence not presented was that Andrews was born in 1950 to alcoholic parents who separated after his birth. He and two siblings were left in the care of their grandparents and an aunt, who lived in a poor, segregated neighborhood in Mobile, Ala.

In 1964, when he was 14, Andrews was convicted of joy riding and sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, which a federal judge described as a “penal colony for children” and a juvenile probation officer called a “slave camp for children,” according to evidence presented to the referee.

The children suffered sexual abuse, were beaten regularly and put to work picking cotton and tending vegetables, the evidence showed.

Three months after he was released from the reform school, Andrews and a friend robbed a grocery store clerk. His friend shot and killed the clerk. While fleeing, they robbed a taxi driver. Andrews was convicted of murder and robbery and went to prison in Alabama at 16.

Conditions in Alabama’s prisons at the time were later determined by a court to violate the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Andrews was sexually assaulted and beaten in prison. One of the prisons where he was incarcerated had just been integrated when Andrews arrived, and the white guards resented the black inmates. Prisoners learned to live in a constant state of tension and carried knives in full view of prison guards, the referee found.

Brown, writing for the majority, said that even if defense lawyers had investigated Andrews’ family background more intently, the facts would not have persuaded the jury to be more lenient.

“The testimony describing his upbringing and early family life generally showed it to be relatively stable and without privation and abuse,” Brown wrote.

“All but one of his siblings completed high school, and only one had a minor brush with the law,” Brown observed.

Acknowledging that Andrews had experienced “horrifically demeaning and degrading” treatment, the court said testimony about that part of his life would have opened the door to evidence of Andrews’ own violent conduct in prison.

“Rather than engendering sympathy, the evidence could well have reinforced an impression of him as a person who had become desensitized and inured to violence and disrespect for the law,” Brown wrote.

But Kennard said Andrews’ lawyers pursued a “disastrous strategy” and argued that the evidence of Andrews’ sufferings as a boy might have prevented his death sentence.