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The significant (and valuable) role of California's death penalty in the Chelsea King case

By Douglas A. Berman

As regular readers may know, I consider the death penalty's role as a catalyst for resoving difficult murder cases via pleas to lesser sentences to be one of the least appreciated and most important justifications for preserving this ultimate punishment.  For this reason (and others), I found especially significant and interesting the role that the California death penalty appeared to play in yesterday's plea deal resolution of the high-profile Chelsea King murder.  First, here are the basics from this press report, which is headlined "Sex offender pleads guilty to killing two teen girls: In a deal to avoid the death penalty, John Albert Gardner III admits to the murders of Chelsea King, 17, and Amber Dubois, 14." A 31-year-old registered sex offender pleaded guilty Friday to murdering two teenage girls in northern San Diego County in a deal that spares him from the death penalty...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on April 17, 2010 (boomark / email).