Death Sentence Upheld for Killer of Paperboy, 12

SAN FRANCISCO —  The state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence of an Anaheim man for the sexual assault and strangulation murder of a 12-year-old boy who came to the killer’s door offering newspaper subscriptions.

The justices, pointing to the “extreme callousness and cruelty” of the crime, unanimously rejected an appeal of the death sentence by Robert Jackson Thompson, 42. Thompson was convicted of the August, 1981, murder of Benjamin Lee Brenneman, a carrier for the Orange County Register.

The court disagreed with Thompson that the death penalty would be cruel and unusual punishment because he suffered from the mental disease of pedophilia--sexual attraction to children--and had used drugs and alcohol on the day of the crime.

“Society is not compelled to suffer forcible sexual predations upon its children by depraved repeat offenders,” retired Justice Marcus M. Kaufman, participating by special assignment, wrote for the court.

The justices also rejected Thompson’s claim that although he had molested the boy and forced him into his car trunk, the victim’s death had been accidental and that capital punishment would be unfairly disproportionate to Thompson’s guilt.

“The defendant’s culpability here is immense,” Kaufman wrote. “He forcibly sodomized and killed a boy of 12 who was innocently trying to sell him a newspaper subscription, leaving him or his dead body hog-tied like an animal in brush by the side of a road in a rural area.”

The morning after he disappeared, the boy was found dead on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, his neck tightly bound with a rope passed down his back to encircle his wrists and ankles.

A tenant in the apartment building the boy served as a paper carrier told police she had seen the boy talking the night before with Thompson, a parolee convicted for a sex offense against a 14-year-old youth. Thompson was arrested and questioned by police. Finally, he admitted molesting the boy, placing him in his car trunk and abandoning him--but denied killing him.

An Orange County Superior Court jury convicted Thompson of forcible sodomy, lewd conduct and murder, but deadlocked over whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison. On retrial, a second jury returned a verdict of death.

The victim’s mother, Kay Brenneman of Anaheim, expressed relief that the state high court had finally ruled in the case. “I just broke down and cried,” she said. “I’d been waiting and waiting and waiting for this for 8 1/2 years. I’m just thrilled that there is justice, even if it takes a while.”

She said the decision “won’t bring Benjamin back, but it does mean that this person is not ever going to get the chance to hurt another child. It places value on our children’s lives.”

Brenneman was co-chair of a victims’ rights group that supported the successful 1986 campaign against former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other court members who had voted consistently to overturn death sentences. “That campaign gave us the new justices who made this decision,” she said.

Thompson, in his appeal to the state Supreme Court, contended that his conviction should be overturned because police lied to him during questioning and psychologically coerced him into making incriminating statements.

The justices acknowledged that investigators falsely told Thompson his car had been traced to the place the boy’s body was found. But police deception does not necessarily invalidate a confession, the court said, and there was insufficient evidence the incriminating statements were made involuntarily.

The court also rejected Thompson’s claim that gruesome photographs of the victim admitted into evidence were prejudicial and were presented only to inflame jurors.

The photographs were validly presented as evidence the victim had been intentionally strangled, the court held. They also were “highly relevant to another circumstance of the crime: the extreme callousness and cruelty with which the innocent and defenseless 12-year-old victim was treated and killed,” Kaufman wrote.

And the court turned down Thompson’s argument that a death sentence would be unconstitutional because he did not intend to kill the victim.

Such proof of intent to kill is not required for one who kills during commission of a felony--in this case sodomy--the court said. And further, there was “strong evidence” Thompson intended to kill the boy, the court said.