Death penalty overturned because of Bible quotes

Judge finds prosecutor committed misconduct by veering from facts, law

By Kristina Davis | 5:15 p.m. Dec. 8, 2015 | Updated, 5:15 p.m.

Rudolph Roybal in 1992, during his trial. U-T file


A judge has overturned the death sentence in the murder of an Oceanside housewife, finding the prosecutor committed “egregious misconduct” by telling jurors the Bible calls for murderers to be sentenced to death.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller wrote that the repeated quotations and references to biblical law in the prosecutor’s closing statements were so inflammatory that they affected the outcome of Rudolph Roybal’s 1992 trial.

“The prosecutor’s improper argument presented an intolerable danger that the jury minimized its role as fact finder and encouraged jurors to vote for death because it was God’s will, and not that the imposition of the death penalty complied with California and federal law,” Miller wrote in a 226-page opinion granting Roybal’s appeal.

The opinion was filed last week.

The judge also chastised Roybal’s defense attorneys, ruling they provided ineffective counsel by not objecting to the prosecutor’s inappropriate closing remarks.

“The failure of defense counsel to object to such egregious misconduct and secure an admonition deprived defendant of the fundamental fairness of a death penalty proceeding free from foul prosecutorial blows,” Miller said.

The ruling directs prosecutors to either grant Roybal, 59, a new penalty phase trial to determine if he should be sentenced to death, or to resentence him to life without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors have about four months to decide how to proceed.

Prosecutors can also appeal the judge’s ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The District Attorney’s Office, which initially tried the case, said it is reviewing the ruling and declined to comment further Tuesday.

One of the deciding factors for the judge in making his ruling was an acknowledgment of just how close the penalty phase of the trial was, as jurors at one point announced they were deadlocked on the death penalty and at other times asked for testimony to be read back about Roybal’s neglectful upbringing, his alcohol and drug use at an early age and his brain damage and dysfunction.

“Unquestionably, the jurors struggled with their decision,” Miller noted.

Roybal was a 33-year-old drifter who had come from Santa Fe, N.M., to stay with his half-brother for awhile in Oceanside in 1989.

Testimony at the trial in Vista Superior Court was rife with details about his horrific childhood. His mother drank alcohol while pregnant with him, then later neglected him, and at one point offered to give him up to appease her husband at the time, according to testimony.

Roybal started drinking and sniffing paint at age 9 and suffered from various personality disorders.

By the time he made it to Oceanside, he’d already been convicted of six felonies, including a drug-fueled attack on a former girlfriend and a car chase that ended with his passenger firing shots at a pursuing police officer.

While staying with his brother, he made money by offering to do yard work for people, riding around on his bicycle and knocking on doors. He lived about a half-mile from Yvonne Weden, a 65-year-old arthritic woman who stayed home alone at night while her husband worked.

She suffered from hearing loss and was on crutches due to an ankle injury.

After performing about four days of gardening for the Wedens, he was fired because he was too slow. Even after that, the Wedens never took down the scrap of paper pinned to the bulletin board with his name and number.

Yvonne Weden, clad in pajamas, was found dead in her bedroom about a week or so later. She’d been stabbed sometime overnight 13 times — twice so brutally that two of her ribs were broken — and beaten, according to testimony. Her neck had been slashed.

A Camel cigarette butt — the kind Roybal was known to smoke — was found on the floor, and the scrap of paper bearing his name gone from the bulletin board. Some of her jewelry was missing, including the wedding ring on her finger.

Roybal left for New Mexico the next day, and his mother saw him hide a plastic bag in a cinder block wall near her house. Police found it contained some of the Wedens’ property, including jewelry.

A researcher testified that DNA from several items, including a folding knife, bloody jewelry box and the cigarette butt, could have come from either Weden or Roybal.

Roybal later told a psychiatrist that he took drugs on “Thursday” and “the next thing he remembered was getting off the bus in Santa Fe,” according to the court record. He said that he had “absolutely no idea how he got the jewelry.”

A jury found Roybal guilty of first-degree murder, robbery and burglary in 1992.

The penalty phase that followed lasted nine days, during which jurors were presented with details of Roybal’s upbringing and mental history.


Deputy District Attorney James D. Koerber+Read Caption

When it came time for closing statements, Deputy District Attorney James Koerber told jurors: “There is another book, written long ago, that mentions the crime of murder, and mentions what is the appropriate penalty for the crime of murder, and that book says a couple of different things.

“It says, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’” Koerber continued. “It says ‘And if he smite with an instrument of iron so that he die, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death.’ It says, moreover, ‘Ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer which is guilty of death, but shall be surely put to death.’”

Roybal’s public defenders, Jack Campbell and Kathleen Cannon, did not object.

“It is evident that the prosecutor meant to intentionally and forcefully argue that religious authority mandated the death penalty” rather than the law and the evidence presented in this case, Miller ruled.

Miller also rejected arguments that the defense attorneys made a tactical decision to not object , noting that they objected to other points during closing statements.

Alex Simpson, a professor at California Western School of Law, said the issue is less about the Bible than the prosecutor asking the jury to make a decision based on something other than the evidence presented in the case.

“It’s an appeal to an authority or other evidence that shouldn’t be considered by the jury,” Simpson said in an interview. “In reality, the only thing a jury should do is consider what are the facts and how do the facts inform my decision to vote one way or the other.”

A state appeals court had earlier found that the prosecutor’s comments were clear misconduct, but concluded that it had no real effect on the outcome of the case.

With Roybal’s state appeals exhausted, he moved forward with a habeas corpus claim in 2013 to the San Diego federal court. The state Attorney General’s Office argued the case against Roybal’s appellate attorneys, John Lanahan and Elizabeth Missakian.

Miller denied several other claims in the appeal, including allegations that a potential juror was wrongly dismissed based on her views of the death penalty, that the jury could not consider Roybal’s past crimes as non-serious, and that some jurors appeared to share their personal experiences with domestic violence or child abuse during deliberations.

Staff writer Dana Littlefield contributed to this report.
kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com, (619) 293-1391

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