The death penalty is still a thing in many states, including California. But California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, put an indefinite moratorium on executions in March 2019. There are still tons of people sitting “on Death Row,” in legal limbo. One of those people? Scott Peterson, who murdered his eight-months-pregnant wife Laci Peterson in 2002. The Scott Peterson case was a HUGE deal at the time for many reasons. A sympathetic, photogenic, pregnant, vulnerable victim, a sly husband with secrets, the mistress who helped the cops get justice for the murdered wife. Scott Peterson was convicted of two counts of murder in 2004 and sentenced to death in 2005. He’s been on death row this whole time. But now his death-penalty sentence has been overturned. Meaning, he’s still in prison, but he’ll get a new sentencing trial.
Scott Peterson has been on California’s death row since 2005, convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the 2002 death of his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn son, Conner. But Peterson, now 47, has scored a surprising legal victory.
PEOPLE confirms that the California Supreme Court has reversed Peterson’s death penalty conviction and ordered a new sentencing trial for him. The court decision does not overturn the murder conviction and allows the prosecutors to try again for the death penalty in the high-profile case. In its ruling, the court said that Peterson’s guilty verdict will stay in place.
“Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case,” the court said in its ruling. “We reject Peterson’s claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.” But the court went on to say that the trial judge “made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Peterson’s right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase.”
Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she disappeared from her Modesto home on Christmas Eve day of 2002. Her body was found in April 2003 in San Francisco Bay. Peterson claimed that Laci was killed as she walked the couple’s dog after Peterson left to go on a solo fishing trip on Christmas Eve morning. But as the case moved forward, jurors heard about Peterson’s dark secrets, including a months-long affair with a woman named Amber Frey, who was unaware that Peterson was married when she started dating him.
Frey later worked with prosecutors, taping damning phone calls with Peterson. During trial, she testified for several days about her relationship with Peterson, her realization that he was still married and that his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, had vanished. Frey first called police in Modesto, California, in late December 2002 to disclose the affair.
This surprises me because I sort of forgot that Peterson had not actually been executed already. I know it takes a while for an execution to happen, but fifteen years? Hm. And I’m not saying that with any particular agenda – I’m not particularly for or against the death penalty and I think death penalty opponents should stop making moral arguments and instead make a process argument of “the death penalty is a waste of resources because people sit on death row for decades and there are endless appeals and it’s a huge time suck.” Scott Peterson could be the face of that – at this point, fifteen years after he was sentenced to death, certainly people would be content with Peterson just staying in prison forever?
Photos courtesy of Getty.
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