The state Supreme Court overturned the convictions and death sentence Monday of a man who was found guilty of murdering his mother and the police chief who tried to protect her.
Dreamstime/TNS
In a rare move, the state Supreme Court unanimously overturned the convictions and death sentence Monday of a man who was found guilty of murdering his mother and the police chief who tried to protect her. The court said the trial judge wrongly seated a juror who was friends with the police chief and had planned to attend his funeral.
The court, which has six Democratic appointees and one Republican, has upheld nearly all the death sentences it has considered in recent years. This was only the third time in more than three years that the justices have overturned a defendant’s capital murder conviction as well as his death sentence.
In a separate opinion, three liberal justices — led by Joshua Groban, an appointee of Gov. Gavin Newsom — cited evidence of the defendant’s mental illness and said the court will eventually have to decide whether death sentences for those with psychiatric conditions violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
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The defendant, Omar Deen of Calipatria (Imperial County), was convicted of fatally shooting his mother, Rachel Deen, and Police Chief J. Leonard Speer in March 1998.
Rachel Deen had inherited several hundred thousand dollars when her husband died three years earlier, and prosecutors said her son wanted the money. He was arrested after attacking his mother and an officer who tried to protect her, but was later allowed to return to his home, where Speer was sent to serve him with a restraining order. When Speer arrived, the court said, Omar Deen punched him, then grabbed Speer’s gun and fatally shot his mother and the police chief.
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Psychiatric witnesses said Deen had a low IQ and a “severe thought disorder,” was schizophrenic and had used heroin, LSD and other drugs. Deen, now 57, is being held in a prison drug treatment center in Corcoran (Kings County). While Monday’s ruling returns his case to Superior Court for a possible retrial, Deen could instead be committed to a mental hospital for treatment.
During jury selection at his trial, the court said, one prospective juror, a former police employee in nearby El Centro, disclosed that he had known Speer for a number of years, also knew many of the potential witnesses, and was on his way to the chief’s funeral when he was called away. Being fair in a case like this one “might be a little difficult,” he told Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Jones.
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Deen’s attorney had already used all 20 peremptory challenges, which allow each side to remove jurors without stating a reason, so the attorney asked Jones to dismiss the prospective juror because of bias. The judge refused, saying he believed the juror’s statement that he could put his feelings aside and assess the evidence impartially. The 12 jurors then found Deen guilty of the two murders and recommended a death sentence, which Jones approved.
But the state’s high court ruled Monday that Jones’ actions had violated Deen’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury.
The judge “misunderstood existing precedent to rigidly hold that if a juror said they could be impartial, follow the law, that’s good enough,” Justice Carol Corrigan wrote in the 7-0 ruling. The trial court, she said, “failed to exercise its judgment as the law requires.”
Corrigan was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is the only Republican appointee on the court. In a concurring opinion, Groban, joined by Justices Goodwin Liu and Kelli Evans, said there was evidence that Deen, “starting at a young age, suffered from severe mental illness.”
“The time will come when we need to determine whether executing someone who is psychotic or schizophrenic or hears voices offends ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,’” Groban wrote, quoting the U.S. Supreme Court’s standard for unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” in a 1958 ruling.
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Groban’s opinion “makes the important point that many people sentenced to death in California suffer from serious mental illness and that the criminal legal system is poorly equipped to handle these cases,” said Christina Spaulding, chief deputy in the state public defender’s office, which represented Deen.
“We hope that Mr. Deen will receive the treatment he needs and not face another capital prosecution,” Spaulding said by email, and the case also should help to convince Newsom, who has declared a moratorium on executions, “to grant universal clemency” to all 578 condemned inmates in California, reducing their death sentences to prison terms.
There was no immediate comment from prosecution lawyers in the case.
The case is People v. Deen, No. S092615.