Court spares killer’s life — says Nazi views are irrelevant
The state Supreme Court overturned a San Diego man’s death sentence Thursday for the murders of two parkinglot employees during a 1999 robbery, saying the prosecutor used inflammatory evidence to convince jurors that he deserved to die.
The court upheld Jeffrey Scott Young’s murder convictions but said his whitesupremacist views — and symbols such as his multiple Nazi tattoos — were irrelevant to the case and may have influenced the death verdict.
“The Constitution ... protects even deeply offensive and hateful beliefs,” Justice Leondra Kruger said in the 70 ruling. Such evidence is allowed when it might show the motive for the crime, she wrote, or contradict a defense claim of good moral character, but not as it was used here, to condemn Young as the personification of historic evil.
Kruger also cited a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned a Delaware man’s death sentence because jurors heard evidence of his affiliation with the whitesupremacist Aryan Brotherhood, a fact unconnected to the crime.
“The U.S. Supreme Court made it clear, you don’t use a person’s abstract beliefs when it’s unrelated to the crime,” said Berkeley attorney Kathy Moreno, who represented Young in his appeal. “This was not a hate crime.”
The San Diego County district attorney’s office will review the court ruling, it said in a statement, and has not decided whether to pursue a new penalty trial.
Young, now 45, was convicted of murder in the fatal shootings of Teresa Perez and Jack Reynolds during the July 1999 robbery of the Five Star parking lot near San Diego International Airport. Prosecutors said Young shot Perez, 31, a booth operator, and another robber shot Reynolds, 44, the parking lot manager.
The jury at Young’s first trial in 2005 found him guilty but deadlocked on his sentence. A second jury in 2006 returned a unanimous death verdict. Another defendant, Max Anderson, pleaded guilty to the murders in 2009 and was sentenced to life without parole.
At the penalty phase, prosecution witnesses described Young as a skinhead who belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood and another neoNazi group, American Front. One witness said Young had put red laces in his boots after the killings, a skinhead statement that “you drew the blood of an enemy.”
An expert witness from the AntiDefamation League described tattoos that included versions of a swastika, a Nazi flag and assorted Nazi symbols, and the words “N— Thrasher” and Weiss Macht, German for “white power.” His letters also included the number 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler,” the witness said.
In closing arguments, the prosecutor, referring to Young’s tattoos, called him a “walking billboard of hate” and noted that Young had included Nazi symbols in a loving letter to his grandmother. What someone puts on his body, the prosecutor argued, “says a whole lot about what you are thinking and about who you are.”
The court this week said some of the evidence was properly allowed, such as the red laces, which showed Young’s “consciousness of guilt,” and details used to rebut testimony by Young’s grandmother that he was a committed family man. But racism had no connection to the murders, Kruger said, and most of the evidence was unrelated to anything except his moral character.
“The prosecutor openly and repeatedly invited the jury to do precisely what the law does not allow: to weigh the offensive and reprehensible nature of (Young’s) abstract beliefs in determining whether to impose the death penalty,” Kruger said.