Deadlock frustrates families

Kim Smith

Monday, June 19, 2000 | 10:55 a.m.

The families of Peter Talamantez, Jeffrey Biddle, Matthew Mowen and Tracey Gorringe thought they were hours away from ending two years of heart-wrenching court proceedings.

They were wrong.

Jurors could not agree whether Donte Johnson should receive the death penalty. Prosecutors said the jurors split 11-1 Friday afternoon for the death penalty. Defense attorneys said they were evenly split between death and life without parole.

A three-judge panel made up of District Judge Jeffrey Sobel and two out-of-county judges will now have to decide the 23-year-old's fate after rehearing the penalty portion of his trial.

A date for that hearing will be set Tuesday, but a decision is likely months off.

Deputy District Attorney Robert Daskas said the state is ready.

"The sooner the better," Daskas said. "We're very confident that the judges will do the right thing and put Johnson to death."

Frustrated is the best way to describe the victims' family members.

"It just makes you wonder how many have to die before he'll come up with the right decision," Cindy Mowen, Matthew's mother, said of the juror who prosecutors say was the lone hold-out. "Does he have a magic number? If 10 people died, will he then say it's all right to give him the death penalty?"

Peter Talamantez's mother, Juanita, had the same reaction.

"I'm grateful for the people who were able to see our situation and able to come to the conclusion that the death penalty is the best thing here, but the other ones, they have to sleep with themselves, they have to sleep with the decision they made," Juanita Talamantez said.

"Now we have to go through this torture all over again. We've got to testify again and wait for the judges' decision," she said.

According to authorities, Johnson, Sikia Smith and Terrell Young went to the victims' Terra Linda Avenue home under the mistaken assumption there were $10,000 and a large amount of drugs there.

They duct-taped the young men, laid them on the floor and spent an hour ransacking the home, prosecutors said. Johnson, prosecutors said, shot each of the men once in the back of the head.

Talamantez was 17. Gorringe was 20 and Biddle and Mowen were 19.

Johnson, Smith and Young left the home with $240, a pager, Sony Play Station and VCR.

Smith and Young, who confessed to the crime following their arrests, were convicted last year and are serving no-parole life sentences.

Late Thursday afternoon the jury foreman sent out two notes. One asked what would happen if a juror had changed his mind about the death penalty and would no longer be able to consider it an option. The second asked what would happen if the jurors could not break a deadlock.

The jurors resumed their deliberations Friday morning after Sobel and the attorneys questioned the jurors in a closed court hearing. Two hours later the jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked.

Deputy Special Public Defender Dayvid Figler said he hopes the judges' panel is conscientious as the jurors were.

Jurors, Figler said. "understood that the mitigators were not a justification or an excuse, but that when you're deliberating whether a man should live or die, those are all things that are important to consider."

Both Daskas and fellow prosecutor Gary Guymon said the case will stay with them for a long time.

"The crime scene was just so horrific in this case that it just stays with you. As prosecutors it's impossible not to see it over and over in our heads," Guymon said. "There's no question in my mind that the parents of these kids had to have woken up in the middle of the night countless times with sheer terror in their heads."