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The longer a jury takes to decide the sentence for Alberto Alvarez, the stronger the possibility the jurors could recommend the death penalty, according to Redwood City legal analyst.
Despite a decade-long trend against the death penalty, Alvarez could be the first person sentenced to death in the county in 15 years, according to Dean Johnson, a Redwood City legal analyst and former homicide prosecutor.
Alvarez was convicted by the same jury on Nov. 25 of first-degree murder with special circumstances in the Jan. 7, 2006, killing of East Palo Alto Police Officer Richard May.
The jury has been deliberating since Thursday afternoon and as of midafternoon today had not yet returned a verdict.
“I am fairly confident he will have a death-penalty verdict, given the facts of the case: killing a police officer in a manner so cold-blooded — and there didn’t seem to be an excuse for the crime,” Johnson said.
The six men and six women convicted Alvarez during the trial’s guilt phase with astonishing speed, in just six hours, Johnson said.
That turn-around is “one of the exceptions that prove the rule,” he said.
In most cases a quick verdict favors the defense, he said. But the speed with which the jury reached a conviction, while surprising, indicated jurors seemed “very, very confident” in Alvarez’ guilt, he said.
In life-or-death decisions, long deliberations can indicate serious dialogue, he said.
“There is a reason for that. They take the obligation of taking somebody’s life very seriously,” he said.
The trend in San Mateo County, and statewide, is against prosecutors seeking the death penalty and juries resisting the death penalty. The exception is Los Angeles, which has had an increase in death-penalty verdicts in the last two years, Johnson said.
In four San Mateo County cases in which the prosecutors sought the death penalty within the last decade the juries rejected it, except for the Scott Peterson case in 2004. The last death-penalty recommendation from a jury was in 1994, involving a woman convicted of killing two people execution style.
Peterson’s was a change-of-venue case for the 2002 murder of his wife, Laci, and unborn child in Modesto, Calif.
In Peterson’s trial and sentence, the jury was out “a long, long time,” Johnson recalled, and he thinks that could be the same with the Alvarez jury.