{"id":289241,"date":"2026-04-28T04:59:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T04:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/289241\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T04:59:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T04:59:11","slug":"state-supreme-court-mulling-review-of-overturned-murder-conviction-in-sierra-lamar-disappearance-the-mercury-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/289241\/","title":{"rendered":"State Supreme Court mulling review of overturned murder conviction in Sierra LaMar disappearance \u2013 The Mercury News"},"content":{"rendered":"

The countdown is on for the California Supreme Court to decide whether it will review the reversed murder conviction<\/a> of the man imprisoned for the presumed 2012 kidnapping and murder of Sierra LaMar, whose body has never been found<\/a> in one of the most gripping crimes in South Bay history.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, the California Attorney General\u2019s Office petitioned the state\u2019s highest court to evaluate the Feb. 27 ruling by the 6th District Court of Appeal that threw out murder and related charges<\/a> against 35-year-old Antolin Garcia Torres in 15-year-old Sierra\u2019s disappearance as she walked to a Morgan Hill-area bus stop for school on March 16, 2012.<\/p>\n

The appellate court found that the Santa Clara County Superior Court erred by allowing the county District Attorney\u2019s Office to prosecute the murder and kidnapping charges involving Sierra alongside unrelated attempted kidnapping allegations<\/a> reported three years earlier in parking lots of Safeway grocery stores, at least one of which was Garcia Torres\u2019 workplace.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors characterized the prior allegations as a \u201ctraining ground\u201d for the crimes against Sierra to argue premeditation in the teen\u2019s killing. In undoing the conviction, which resulted in a life-without-parole prison term<\/a> for Garcia Torres, the appellate judges ordered that if prosecutors decide to re-try him, they are barred from telling a jury that Garcia Torres planned to kill Sierra, or from citing the prior attempted kidnapping claims in arguing for his guilt.<\/p>\n

Garcia Torres will remain incarcerated \u2014 records show he is being held in Corcoran State Prison \u2014 pending the appellate process and any subsequent decision by the district attorney\u2019s office on whether to re-file a murder charge against him. According to court rules, the state Supreme Court has 60 days after a petition is filed to decide whether to review a lower court opinion; the court can extend that decision window for up to 30 days.<\/p>\n

Court records show that the attorney general\u2019s petition was received April 8, which means the high court could take until the second week of July to announce whether they will review the case. If the time window passes without a decision, the petition is considered denied; local prosecutors would then be free to re-file charges.<\/p>\n

The district attorney\u2019s office deferred comment to the attorney general\u2019s office, which is litigating the appellate case on their behalf and did not respond to a request for comment. Garcia Torres\u2019 appellate attorney who secured the ruling overturning the conviction also did not respond to messages seeking comment.<\/p>\n

However, the California District Attorneys Association, which represents most of California\u2019s elected county prosecutors, wrote a letter to the state Supreme Court, urging justices to take on the case and undo the conviction reversal. In the 18-page missive, the association\u2019s CEO Greg Totten \u2014 a former Ventura County district attorney \u2014 contends that the 6th District judicial panel \u201csubstituted its personal judgments of the evidence\u201d to reach its conclusion.<\/p>\n

The CDAA letter states that its position echoes part of the attorney general\u2019s petition, and argues that the trial court did not act \u201coutside the bounds of reason\u201d when it allowed the prior kidnapping attempts to be jointly prosecuted.<\/p>\n

The organization also asserts that the fact Sierra\u2019s body still has not been located, despite years of weekend volunteer searches of the area following Sierra\u2019s disappearance, \u201ccircumstantially suggests a preconceived plan to dispose of the body\u201d and supports the notion that some premeditation and planning factored into Garcia Torres\u2019 alleged plot.<\/p>\n

One major tenet of the letter also argues that the state Supreme Court reverse the appellate ruling and provide undisputed, clear guidance to trial courts and prosecutors across the state.<\/p>\n

At the 2017 trial for Garcia Torres, prosecutors relied heavily on DNA evidence they said linked Garcia Torres to Sierra, including traces found in his car, a strand of hair discovered on a piece of rope in the trunk and his DNA found on Sierra\u2019s pants, which were recovered in a field.<\/p>\n

His defense suggested the possibility that Sierra had run away from home, and he denied ever meeting Sierra and initially said he had been on a short fishing trip the morning she disappeared. After being confronted by sheriff\u2019s office detectives with DNA evidence, he said he periodically masturbated in his car and discarded tissues and napkins out the window.<\/p>\n

In the 6th District ruling, Justice Adrienne Grover wrote the three prior attempted kidnapping counts \u2014 in which Garcia Torres was accused of forcing his way into the cars of three women in Safeway parking lots in Morgan Hill over a one-week span \u2014 should have been severed from the murder case, stating that the \u201ccharged murder bore much less resemblance to the three Safeway incidents.\u201d<\/p>\n

She further scrutinized the original conviction by noting that \u201cSierra\u2019s body was not found, raising a question as to the fact of her death, and no evidence clearly established how she died or how defendant had caused her death.\u201d Grover ultimately concluded that \u201cthe prosecutor\u2019s arguments at trial which encouraged the jury to consider the evidence cumulatively also contribute to our finding of prejudice,\u201d and that \u201cthe improper cross-admission of the charges constitute prejudicial errors requiring reversal.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, the state Supreme Court has agreed to review multiple high-profile cases from Santa Clara County where prosecutors challenged an appellate court\u2019s reversal of an initial conviction.<\/p>\n

Those include the 2017 murder verdicts against three county jail deputies convicted in the 2015 killing of mentally ill inmate Michael Tyree, which were overturned in 2022<\/a> citing legislative changes that nullified the \u201cnatural and probable consequences\u201d doctrine that allowed prosecutors to argue that multiple defendants could be collectively guilty of a murder by acting in concert even if it was unclear if all members directly participated in the killing.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court upheld the reversals, and the three men later pleaded to voluntary manslaughter counts<\/a> \u2014 resulting in them being paroled \u2014 under an agreement that required them to admit to being responsible for Tyree\u2019s death in open court.<\/p>\n

The high court has also opted to review the 2020 rape conviction of former San Francisco 49ers star Dana Stubblefield<\/a>, who secured a conviction reversal in late 2024, also from the 6th District court, which ruled that racially tinged remarks in the prosecutor\u2019s closing arguments<\/a> constituted violations of the Racial Justice Act of 2020.<\/p>\n

Stubblefield has been subsequently released from prison custody, and the Supreme Court review is on hold pending the outcome of two death penalty appeals from Los Angeles County that could set precedent for what relief defendants are entitled to under the relatively new law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The countdown is on for the California Supreme Court to decide whether it will review the reversed murder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[123639,123641,3149,48025,3622,7359,25755,193,1331,123640,88,90,89,94029,2214],"class_list":{"0":"post-289241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-antolin-garcia-torres","9":"tag-appellate","10":"tag-attorney-general","11":"tag-conviction","12":"tag-court","13":"tag-district-attorney","14":"tag-kidnapping","15":"tag-morgan-hill","16":"tag-murder","17":"tag-reversal","18":"tag-san-jose","19":"tag-san-jose-headlines","20":"tag-san-jose-news","21":"tag-sierra-lamar","22":"tag-supreme-court"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}