The State - News from May 16, 1989

The state Supreme Court ordered a trial judge to conduct a new review of the death sentence imposed on the killer of a Lake Elsinore retiree during a 1983 kidnaping and robbery spree. With newly appointed Justice Joyce L. Kennard participating in her first decision, the court unanimously upheld the murder conviction of Jeffrey Theodore Sheldon, now 26. But it found also that the judge improperly had failed to state his reasons for upholding the jury’s verdict of death and that new sentencing proceedings must be held. Nonetheless, with Kennard in the majority, the court refused 5 to 2 to require a full-scale penalty retrial for Sheldon, even though the jury erroneously heard testimony accusing him in another case of attempting to murder a Nevada deputy sheriff--a charge of which Sheldon had been acquitted.