death penalty news October 6, 2004
CALIFORNIA: Juries hesitant on death penalty - County's capital punishment rates drop since '94. Peninsula residents are more hesitant to hand down the death penalty than in the past, attorneys in San Mateo County say. Most recently, jurors deadlocked on sending Seti Scanlan, convicted of murdering a Burlingame bank manager, to death row -- despite his repeated requests for it. "Juries in the county seem to lean less in favor of the death penalty than 10 years ago," Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe said. "There has definitely tended to be a softening [on capital punishment]." "Obviously, as prosecutors we like law and order, but we rely on our juries -- they are the public and we represent them," he said, adding that he believes death is an appropriate punishment for "the most evil in society." Wagstaffe, who led the prosecution against Scanlan, said he noticed this switch during jury selection for the Scanlan case, where people open to capital punishment as a sentence were harder to find than a decade earlier. Scanlan's defense attorney, Cliff Cretan, also agreed on the trend toward lenience, saying there appeared to be three times as many potential jurors opposed to the death penalty now as there were in the capital punishment cases he defended in the 1980s and early 1990s. From 1983 to 1994, the DA's office sought the death penalty in 18 cases. Juries obliged in 14 of those cases, Wagstaffe said. But since 1994, the DA has pursued the death penalty only four times -- and it was denied each time, most recently when a jury deadlocked 9-3 on whether to sentence Scanlan to death. That trend, however, is not reflected in California as a whole, where more criminals were sentenced to death in the state in the last 10 years than in the decade before. Wagstaffe pointed to decreased violent crime rates from the 1970s and '80s as a possible reason why jurors do not feel as threatened by crime, while Assistant District Attorney Martin Murray said each case is different and that murders in decades past contained a level of depravity that more recent cases have not had. More potential death penalty cases seem to be filling the San Mateo County Superior Court's docket these days. Scanlan was sentenced last month to life in prison without parole. Meanwhile, Scott Peterson could face the ultimate punishment if convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child. The DA's office is also considering pursuing capital punishment for Hillsborough resident Charles Loo, who was recently arrested for allegedly stabbing his 17-year-old son to death. Carleton Cook, who avoided the death penalty after being convicted for the 1997 murder of a drug dealer in San Mateo, recently pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of second-degree murder after his conviction was overturned earlier this year. And now Donald Beardslee, sentenced to death in 1984, could soon become the first man convicted in San Mateo County to actually be executed for his crimes, after the United States Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal Monday. John Digiacinto, the director of the San Mateo Private Defender Program, agreed that juror attitudes have softened in recent years, despite what he called a generally "conservative juror pool" in San Mateo County as compared to the rest of the Bay Area. He echoed Wagstaffe's assertion that the shift was in part a reflection of a state and national trend of skepticism toward the criminal justice system. "I think that it's not isolated in this county," Digiacinto said. "I think people are disenchanted with capital punishment as a viable penalty." ------ Death penalty statistics for San Mateo County Number of people sentenced to death in the county since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978: 16 Number of those 16 inmates executed to date: 0 People sentenced to death since 1994: 0 Last person sentenced to death in the county: Celeste Carrington, sentenced Nov. 23, 1994, for murdering two people during burglaries in 1992. She is the only woman to be sentenced to death in the county and the last of three people sent to death row in 1994. People sentenced to death in California since 1978: 644 Number of those inmates executed to date: 11 Percentage of Californians sentenced to death in the county: 2.48 percent Death sentences handed out in California from 1984 to 1993: 255 Death sentences handed out in California from 1994 to 2003: 306 Source: California Department of Corrections (source: San Francisco Examiner)
