The Rap Sheet: Nolo's Criminal Law Blog

Rodney Alcala was convicted on Feb. 26, 2010, of murdering 12 year old Robin Samsoe in 1979.  This was his 3rd conviction for the same crime- California appellate courts reversed the first two convictions.  This time around, with the help of DNA evidence that wasn't available at the time of the first two trials, Alcala was also convicted of murdering 4 other women.

Alcala represented himself.  It's often said that a person who represents himself has a fool for a client. In Alcala's case, it might be more appropriate to say that he had a ghoul for a client. 

In a few days, the jury will decide whether to recommend that Alcala be put to death.  But to this point this has been The Case That Would Not Die. The only good thing to come of the prolonged agony for Robin's family and friends is that Alcala lived long enough for DNA testing to enable the police to solve 4 other terrible crimes. 

It took the jurors in the Scott Roeder murder trial all of 37 minutes to convict him of the first degree murder of Dr. George Tiller,brushing aside Roeder's immoral defense that the killing was justified because Dr.Tiller performed abortions.  (See my previous day's blog entry for more information about the case.)

Sometimes American juries are derided for their seemingly irrational decisions.  I think it's worth saluting this Wichita, Kansas jury for getting it right. 

Scott Roeder is charged with murdering Dr. George Tiller.  Testifying in his own defense at the trial, Roeder admitted that he killed Tiller.  And the killing was totally premeditated- Roeder bought a gun, practiced his shot, and killed Tiller inside a church.

Roeder explained that he had a good reason for shooting Tiller- Tiller performed abortions.  Roeder had the chutzpah to explain that "It's never up to man to take life," perhaps temporarily forgetting that he did exactly that when he shot Tiller. 

Roeder undoubtedly hopes that the jurors will find this a valid reason for killing, and if not acquit him at least convict him of nothing more serious than manslaughter.

If the jurors accept this disgusting defense, people like Roeder would have a license to kill anyone who disagrees with their religious beliefs.  Maybe today it's an abortionist, but who knows who would be next.  If your God disapproves of homosexuality, no problem, kill homosexuals.  If your God disapproves of inter-racial dating, no problem, kill those couples.  I write in the hope that sanity prevails on the jury and that Roeder spends the rest of his sorry life in prison.  

Rodney Alcala has twice been convicted of killing 12 year old Robin Samsoe in Huntington Beach (CA) in 1979.  Each time he was sentenced to death.  But both convictions were reversed, so here in Jan. 2010 Alcala is again on trial for killing Robin Samsoe.

Robin has plenty of company this time around.  As Alcala remained in prison, DNA testing linked him to the deaths of 4 other late-1970's CA murder victims.  So Alcala now is charged with 5 murders.

Ironically, Alcala's first conviction was reversed because the trial judge allowed the prosecution to offer evidence of Alcala's violence towards girls other than Robin. Now that evidence rules have changed and Alcala is charged with other crimes, Jury # 3 will hear plenty of evidence suggesting that Alcala is a serial killer.    

Alcala has chosen to represent himself.  That's less of a gamble than it seems.  He is now 66 years old, so even if he is convicted and the conviction is upheld, the chances that he'll be executed are virtually nil.

      

A "Pyrrhic victory" connotes a victory with disastrous consequences.  This is one way to understand the defendant's "victory" in the California case of People v. Morgain (2009).  Morgain was convicted of murder, and sentenced to a term of 51 years to life in state prison.  Morgain appealed, and the court rejected all of his arguments except for one.  The court agreed with Morgain that he should have been credited with serving 249 days in custody prior to the date of his sentence, rather than the credit of 248 days that the trial court had given him.  Winning one extra day of credit on a sentence of 51 years to life seems like a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one!     

Bruce Lisker's mother Dorka was brutally murdered in 1983.  Lisker was convicted of the murder in 1985, and languished in prison until August 2009, when a federal judge overturned the conviction.  The judge ruled that the conviction had been based on false evidence, and that Lisker's trial attorney had not defended him competently.  The Los Angeles D.A. could have re-tried Lisker, but in September 2009 surprised everyone at a court hearing by announcing that it would not re-file murder charges against Lisker because it lacked evidence of guilt.  After spending about a quarter of a century in prison, Lisker was finally free.

The D.A.'s office was hardly apologetic.  The prosecutor insisted that he was personally confident of Lisker's guilt, but had to drop the charge due to a lack of evidence.  What a terribly embarrassing thing for the D.A. to say.  What would have been wrong with "So sorry?"  

The evidence on which Lisker's conviction was based turned out to be so unreliable and perhaps even falsified that even Phillip Rabichow, the Deputy D.A. who prosecuted Lisker in the 1985 trial, told investigators said that he had a reasonable doubt of Lisker's guilt.  If you want to read about the sordid details, they are brilliantly captured in this 2005 LA Times story.http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/22/local/me-lisker22?pg=17.  Shoddy police work, lying, jailhouse snitches, a rush to judgment by the police, a suspect who at 17 already had an unsavory past-- you'll find in Lisker's story all of the usual suspects when miscarriages of justice occur. 

The added ingredient in Lisker's story is the D.A.'s nasty and uncalled-for farewell.  The D.A.'s mindset serve as an assurance that future miscarriages of justice will occur.  

  

The L.A. County Coroner has ruled Michael Jackson's death a homicide. Many people confuse homicide with murder, but the term homicide refers to any killing of one person by another, legal or not. Thus, a homicide includes killings done in self-defense. All murders are homicides, but certainly not all homicides are murders.

The coroner's ruling that Michael Jackson's case was a homicide does not mean that someone will be charged with murder.  It's far more likely that at least one of Jackson's doctors will be charged with involuntary manslaughter.  This would require a prosecutor to prove that a doctor's gross negligence in medicating Jackson caused his death.

The most likely defendant is Dr. Conrad Murray, who apparently administered the combination of drugs that caused Jackson's death.  If so, one can feel sorry for Dr. Murray.  Over the years, countless doctors probably helped Jackson abuse drugs.  Poor Dr. Murray had the bad luck to be Jackson's doctor when his body was unable to survive the latest dose.  

A recent California case demonstrates once again that police officers can engage in deception in an effort to elicit confessions.

In People v. Mays, 95 Cal. Rptr. 219 (2009), the defendant was suspected of participating in a murder.  Mays denied knowing anything about the murder and demanded a lie detector test.  Instead the cops conducted a phony lie detector test.  They connected Mays to a machine and asked him some questions, then showed him a phony written report indicating that he had failed the test.  At that point, the defendant admitted that he had been at the murder scene.

At trial, Mays claimed that his confession was inadmissible in evidence because it was the result of police trickery.  The court ruled that the confession was admissible, because the trickery did not constitute coercion. 

It's a good thing for the cops that Mays didn't ask them to take a lie detector test about the lie detector test.  They would have flunked.

The label "cop killer" usually denotes people who kill police officers. In a strange twist, the label may also fit LA police detective Stephanie Lazarus. Lazarus is charged with murdering Sherri Rasmussen in 1986.  Lazarus was a cop in uniform at the time she allegedly killed Sherri in a jealous rage because Sherri married Lazarus' ex-boyfriend.

The detectives assigned to investigate Sherri's murder ignored all the evidence suggesting that Lazarus was the killer.  Lazarus was not arrested until 2009, after new "cold case" detectives used DNA to link Lazarus to the murder.

To obtain a sample of Lazarus' saliva, an LAPD cop secretly followed Lazarus to a convenience store and took a plastic utensil that Lazarus had just used from a trash bin.  (Police work can be so glamorous!)  But here's my question: Shouldn't it be standard procedure for police agencies to have DNA profiles for all police officers in their files?  Once the cold case detectives realized that Lazarus was a suspect in Sherri's killing, they should have been able to search their files rather than a convenience store's trash to obtain Lazarus' DNA.

A secondary question concerns the retirement benefits currently being collected by the inept detectives who ignored the clues pointing to Lazarus as the killer.  Can these detectives be demoted retroactively?  They decided that Sherri's killer was a burglar, even though all that was missing from Sherri's home was her marriage license and her car.  How awful for Sherri's relatives to know that Sherri's killer remained free only because LAPD detectives didn't care enough to look for her.      

Jesse Jay Montejo was charged with first-degree murder in Louisiana. Montejo remained mute at his first court hearing as the judge appointed an attorney to represent him. After the police read Montejo his Miranda rights, but before Montejo could meet with his attorney, Montejo showed the police where he had put the murder weapon and wrote a letter of apology to his victim's widow.  Over the objection of Montejo's lawyer, the trial judge ruled that the prosecutor could offer the letter into evidence at trial to help prove that Montejo committed the murder.

In a decision issued May 26, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the trial court's ruling in a 5-4 majority decision (Montejo v. Louisiana - PDF).

The decision overturned a two-decades-old case that basically said that once a lawyer has been appointed for a defendant, any statements the defendant makes to the police in the absence of the attorney should not be admitted into evidence.  The rule's purpose was to discourage police officers from "badgering" defendants into talking to them. But a statement that a defendant is badgered into making is likely to be inadmissible even under the Montejo decision. In deciding Montejo, the Court majority assumed that Montejo had written the letter voluntarily.  If so, said the majority, there's no valid reason to exclude it from evidence.  But if the police hadn't warned Montejo of his right to remain silent, or if they hectored Montejo into writing the letter, then the letter won't be admissible in evidence.

Probably few suspects who already have lawyers are as cooperative as Montejo and decide to talk voluntarily to police officers. Thus, as the Court majority admits, its decision is unlikely to affect many cases.