U.S. | Federal death penalty decision on accused Oakland cop killers won’t be made until Biden/Harris administration takes over

OAKLAND — What seemed like the most likely possibility is now official: The U.S. Department of Justice won’t make a decision on whether to seek the death penalty against two Bay Area men accused of murdering federal Ofc. Patrick Dave Underwood until after there is a new attorney general in place.

In a Wednesday order, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided with the attorneys for both Steven Carrillo, 32, and Robert Alvin Justus, 30, who have opposed what they call a rush by federal prosecutors to decide whether the death penalty should be on the table for both defendants. The defense has argued that the pandemic has also put them at an unfair disadvantage, as it has inhibited them from meeting with their clients face-to-face and establishing mutual trust.

“Given the lack of contact visits, the Court is not inclined to impose an arbitrary deadline for each defendant to submit his mitigation submission issue to the United States Attorney,” Rogers wrote in her ruling. The “mitigation submission” will essentially be a list of defense reasons not to execute both men.

Carrillo — who also faces potential capital charges in the slaying of a Santa Cruz Sheriff’s sergeant in Ben Lomond a week after Underwood’s killing — is the accused triggerman, and Justus is the alleged driver in the May 29 drive-by shooting. Prosecutors say the two met shortly before after connecting on a Facebook group for followers of the far-right Boogaloo movement and drove to Oakland intent on killing police officers.

Prosecutors were pushing to make a decision on the death penalty before the end of the year. Rogers’ order takes that off the table and sets the next court date for February 2021. Carrillo and Justus are being prosecuted in the Northern District of California, which is headed by U.S. Attorney Dave Anderson, but death penalty decisions require sign-off from Washington D.C.

And if the incoming administration keeps its campaign promises, the possibility of federal prosecutors seeking death against either man seems far-fetched.

In the early 1990s, when he was a U.S. senator, president-elect Joe Biden supported capital punishment and championed the 1994 crime bill that expanded its usage. But more recently, Biden has strayed from that point of view, pledging during the 2020 campaign to work toward ending the death penalty and halting federal executions, which President Donald Trump resumed this year (seven people on federal death row have been executed this year and three more executions are scheduled for 2020).

Soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, a former district attorney and California attorney general, has opposed the death penalty throughout her career as a prosecutor, though in the early 2000s she was widely criticized for blocking attempts to conduct DNA tests to verify the guilt or exonerate a man on death row. The example perhaps most analogous to the Carrillo-Justus case: In 2004, as San Francisco district attorney, she famously decided against seeking to execute a 22-year-old man accused of murdering an on-duty policeman.

Rogers’ ruling also orders the United States Marshals Services to “produce each defendant to a United States courthouse in this District so that each can meet in person with one or both of their defense lawyers as frequently as necessary to ensure that counsel for each defendant is proceeding as expeditiously as possible to prepare their submission to the United States Attorney with information bearing on the decision whether to seek the death penalty.”

Source: mercurynews.com, N. Gartrell, November 13, 2020

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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Arizona AG seeks execution date for man convicted in 1995 trooper killing

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