Bad and Worse Tip the Scales of Justice

There’s probably no point in comparing the two grisly crimes. What’s been done can’t be undone. Trying to decide which is the more repugnant won’t get us anywhere. Suffice it to say that redemption for the guilty is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

But it was impossible to escape the presence last week, on the same page of the newspaper, of the fates awaiting Alejandro Avila and the former Charles Rothenberg, who now goes by the name Charley Charles.

In Orange County, the jury that convicted Avila will decide this week whether he will be executed for kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing 5-year-old Samantha Runnion in 2002. I doubt that even Mr. Avila puzzles over where that deliberation will end up.

Rothenberg, as he was known during his criminal heyday in Orange County 20 years ago, faces a whole different future. A judge in San Francisco sentenced him Friday to 7 years, 4 months for being a felon in possession of a gun. With time served since 2001, Rothenberg is eligible for release in late 2006.

Obviously, it’s not the weapons charge that put Rothenberg in the paper along with Avila. It was his 1983 conviction for giving his 6-year-old son a sleeping pill before dousing the area around his bed with kerosene and setting fire to the Buena Park motel room where he’d taken the boy. It strikes me as additionally heinous that Rothenberg took his unwitting son with him when he bought the kerosene.

For those previously unfamiliar with the now-dated Rothenberg case, his actions may seem no less grotesque than Avila’s. But here’s the difference: Young David Rothenberg survived. Although suffering third-degree burns over 90% of his body and being left basically unrecognizable, he recovered and is alive today.

Now for the question that I think most people would have: You call that a difference?

No, I don’t.

It’s absurd, in a garden-variety common sense way, that Rothenberg isn’t seen in the same way as Avila. His son survived as atrocious an act as you can imagine only because something in the room exploded and David, who’d been heard screaming, was pulled out. By then, his father had fled.

As bleeding a heart as I am, I’ve never understood why some attempted murder charges don’t carry the same punishment as an actual murder. Because a shooter misses his target’s heart by an inch, he escapes a murder charge. Because Rothenberg only disfigured his son instead of killing him as he intended, he served less than seven years before being paroled.

It’s not that anyone went soft on Rothenberg. He was sentenced to the max for the arson-attempted murder, but that was only 13 years. Five years into the sentence, a still-bothered judge told Times reporter Nancy Wride, “He would have died in prison if I had anything to say about it.”

This time around, the system tried to give Rothenberg a life sentence under the three-strikes law, but another unhappy judge in San Francisco said she was compelled by law to count the 1983 crime as a single action -- not the dual attempted murder-arson charges under which Rothenberg was convicted. Thus, the lighter range for his weapons conviction.

So while Avila probably will get a death sentence, Rothenberg gets another reprieve.

I’ve written more than once over the years that I don’t support capital punishment. I still don’t, but I’ve also written that you won’t find me at a candlelight vigil to protest certain executions, either.

I won’t lose a wink of sleep on the night Avila is executed.

Rothenberg, 64, likely would have been executed by now if his son hadn’t survived.

I said I wouldn’t try to rank the two crimes.

But since we’re left with nothing but a “what-if” exercise, tell me if you’d take this deal, which I would in a second:

Spare Avila’s life, if, in exchange, we could put Rothenberg away for life.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.