Daily Journal: State’s high court reverses death sentence, nixes conviction

State’s high court reverses death sentence, nixes conviction
Defendant's conviction in one murder was obtained in violation of double jeopardy

The state Supreme Court on Thursday voted unanimously to overturn the death sentence of convicted robber and murderer Tommy Adrian Trujeque after invalidating a second-degree murder conviction because of double jeopardy and setting aside prior murder and multiple murder as bases for death-qualifying special circumstances.

Trujeque, at the time a member of the White Fence gang, stabbed to death his cousin's abusive boyfriend in 1986, and, a year later, a fellow poker player. While serving a life sentence for an armed robbery in 1998, Trujeque confessed to both murders to receive the death penalty.

However, the high court found Thursday that the defendant's conviction in the poker player murder was obtained in violation of the double jeopardy clause.

"Defendant was placed once in jeopardy at the adjudicatory juvenile hearing before the referee, and once again, when he was prosecuted for the same offense in adult court where he pleaded guilty," wrote Justice Ming W. Chin. "Because the prior conviction's constitutional deficiency is apparent from the record, thus making it unnecessary for us to remand for a hearing, we must set aside this special-circumstance finding."

Deputy Attorney General Eric J. Kohm said he was "not surprised" by the ruling. Deputy State Public Defender Christina A. Spaulding declined to comment on the case, citing the potential for a motion for rehearing or cert petition.

Frank Zimring, a UC Berkeley law professor who directs the criminal justice research program at Boalt Hall's Earl Warren Legal Institute, said the decision was easy to understand. "It is much easier for judges to make circumscribing penalty decisions than to do so with regard to convictions, but even during its period of political infamy - the Rose Bird court - there were vast differences between the number of penalty reversals and the number of conviction reversals in capital cases," Zimring said. "You could say it's almost costless now, because to live in an environment where you have 740 people on death row and nobody executed, is to mean that nobody's taking the death penalty as a sentence of execution seriously."

California still leads the nation in number of inmates awaiting execution, even as 2014 marks the lowest rate of executions in the U.S. since 1994, according to a recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that opposes capital punishment.

Earlier this month, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed a lower court's decision to sentence Kim Raymond Kopatz to death for the murders of his wife and daughter, while in late April, the court unanimously reversed the death penalty in People v. Smith.

The court also split on two other recent decisions in death appeals: A 4-3 majority decided in April and again last week against rehearing capital punishment cases.

The Trujeque decision does little to address the question of where California's death penalty is headed more generally. "To me this case doesn't affect that tremendously," said Ronald Ahnen, a politics professor at Saint Mary's College of California. "It's about whether or not a couple of cases could be lumped together and taken into account in the death penalty phase as opposed to the merits of the death penalty per se."

More significant, Ahnen said, was last year's historic decision by U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney declaring California's death penalty system unconstitutional on the grounds of systemic delays in executions.

"We're still waiting to see the fallout from that," Ahnen said, "so anything that the Supreme Court does remains under that shadow."