Riverside killer to get a new trial

WASHINGTON —  Twenty-five years ago this month, Jackson Daniels shot and killed two Riverside police officers who had come to arrest him.

Daniels, a career criminal, had two years earlier been shot and left paralyzed as he tried to flee a bank robbery. While his court case was pending, Daniels was recovering at a friend’s house and kept a gun near his bed, apparently waiting for police to come for him.

When officers Dennis Doty and Phil Trust arrived to take him into custody, Daniels pulled out the gun and shot them. He ordered his caretaker to drive him away. The caretaker said Daniels had told her that he had to “pay them back because of what they had done to him.”

He was tried and convicted of murdering the two officers, and in 1983 a jury sentenced him to die.

Now, prosecutors have to start over.

Daniels’ conviction was overturned by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in November, and the Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would not review the case.

In a one-line order in Ayers vs. Daniels, the justices turned away an appeal filed by California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown.

That left standing a 3-0 ruling by the 9th Circuit that said Daniels had been denied a fair trial because of a “complete breakdown of communication” between the defendant and his pair of rookie lawyers.

Judge Harry Pregerson said Daniels had suffered a “constructive denial of counsel” because he was unable and unwilling to work with his lawyers.

“It is understandable that Daniels would mistrust the judicial process and his counsel. When viewed in the context of Daniels’ paranoid delusions -- including his belief that his defense counsel was conspiring with the prosecution to kill him -- it is easy to see why this mistrust led to a complete breakdown of communication,” Pregerson wrote.

Judges Betty Fletcher and Warren Ferguson joined the opinion, which overturned Daniels’ conviction and death sentence.

In their appeal, state prosecutors called it an “absurd result.”

It “provides a detailed and easy-to-follow roadmap for every criminal defendant intent upon disrupting our system of criminal justice: A defendant will be able to overturn a death judgment simply by refusing to cooperate with counsel at trial,” prosecutors said.

Prosecutors in Riverside County “are gearing up to retry this,” said Steve Oetting, a deputy attorney general in San Diego. “But you can imagine the difficulty of conducting a new trial after a quarter-century.”

Also Tuesday, the high court turned away an appeal filed on behalf of Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker who terrorized the Los Angeles area in 1984 and 1985.

Ramirez killed 13 people before he was captured in East Los Angeles. He was sentenced to die.

All of his appeals have been rejected, but he is not likely to be executed soon. He has other appeals pending in the federal court system.

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david.savage@latimes.com