By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
The California Supreme Court on Thursday overturned an Atwater Village gang leader’s conviction and death sentence in a triple-murder case, finding that a juror was improperly excused as the panel was deliberating.
In a unanimous ruling in connection with Timothy McGhee’s automatic appeal, the state’s highest court found that “the record does not support as a demonstrable reality the court’s ruling that the discharged juror was unable to fulfill his duties as a juror,” and that now-retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry’s ruling “therefore was an abuse of discretion.”
Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu wrote on behalf of the panel in a 44-page ruling that the specific accusations of bias against the excused juror that the court credited “were not well founded, relied on the opinion statements of other jurors and did not manifestly support the court’s discharge decision.”
The case was ordered to be sent back to the trial court for further proceedings involving McGhee, who is now 51.
McGhee was sentenced to death in 2009 for the murders of three people on rival turf between 1997 and 2001, with the judge saying then that McGhee appeared to think of the killings as “some kind of perverse sport as if he was hunting human game.”
The judge said at McGhee’s sentencing that there was “compelling” evidence of the defendant’s participation in the Oct. 14, 1997, shooting death of Ronnie Martin; the June 3, 2000, killing of Ryan Gonzalez; and the Nov. 9, 2001, killing of Margie Mendoza.
Perry said then that it was his view that the prosecution had proven McGhee was also involved in a fourth killing — that of a witness against him in November 2001 — in which he was not criminally charged.
McGhee was convicted in October 2007 of three counts of first-degree murder.
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That jury split 10-2 with the majority favoring a death sentence for McGhee. A second penalty phase of trial was held with a different jury, and that panel recommended that McGhee be sentenced to death.
After his conviction in the triple-murder case, he was tried separately and convicted for his participation in a January 2005 riot at a high-security unit at the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles.
McGhee was named to the U.S. Marshals Service’s “15 Most Wanted Fugitive List” before his February 2003 arrest in Bullhead City, Arizona.
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