The Supreme Court today reverses the death sentence, but affirms the conviction, of a White supremacist defendant whom the prosecutor called “a walking billboard of hate.” The defendant in People v. Young had been sentenced for the 1999 murders of two San Diego airport parking lot employees.
The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger holds that the penalty retrial (a first jury convicted defendant, but hung on the penalty) was prejudicially tainted by much of the evidence of “defendant’s White supremacist beliefs, his multiple White supremacist tattoos, and the beliefs of the groups to which he belonged.” Some of the evidence was admissible, but “the central difficulty here is that the trial court also permitted the prosecution on rebuttal to introduce a large quantity of additional evidence concerning defendant’s racist beliefs—not for purposes of illuminating the circumstances of his crime or past acts of violence, but simply for the light the offensiveness of those beliefs shed on his character.”
The court rejected the argument that introduction of less detailed White supremacist evidence at the guilt phase required reversal of the defendant’s conviction.