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Thread: Benjamin Wayne Watta - California Death Row

  1. #1
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    Benjamin Wayne Watta - California Death Row


    Benjamin Wayne Watta


    Summary of Offense:

    Benjamin Wayne Watta, an ex-convict from Florida, was sentenced to death in Orange County on January 20, 2009 for the rape and murder of a Seal Beach woman who was attacked when she went to feed her neighbor's cats on March 23, 1980. He was linked to the murder years later by conclusive DNA evidence. Judge James A. Stotler found that the aggravating circumstances involved in the 1980 murder of Simone Sharpe, 70, far outweighed the mitigating factors of Watta's loveless childhood.

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    January 20, 2009

    Watts sentenced to death

    SANTA ANA - An ex-convict from Florida sat calmly without emotion Tuesday as he was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a Seal Beach woman who was attacked when she went to feed her neighbor's cats in 1980.

    Benjamin Wayne Watta, 63, shook the hands of his two attorneys before he was led to a courtroom holding cell in handcuffs.

    It was the second death penalty handed down by an Orange County judge this year, and the fifth since 2005.

    Superior Court Judge James A. Stotler handed down the sentence after denying pleas from Senior Public Defender Dan Cook for a new trial and to overturn a jury's recommendation of death.

    Cook contended Watta had endured a terrible life from the moment he was born, having been abandoned by his parents and raised in a series of loveless foster home.

    "He had a life no one would wish on any child," Cook said. "He never once had anybody in his life that really cared about him."

    But Stotler found that the aggravating circumstances involved in the 1980 murder of Simone Sharpe and other factors in Watta's life far outweighed the mitigating factors of his childhood.

    Sharpe, 70, disappeared from her Seal Beach home two days before Christmas in 1980 when she went to feed her neighbor's cats.

    Her son found her battered and bruised body in a bedroom of the neighbor's house on Christmas Eve 1980. She had been raped, beaten and stabbed, but the cause of death was listed as suffocation.

    Jurors recommended in July that Watta be put to death in part due to the severity of the Sharpe murder and because Watta had committed numerous other crimes including several other assaults on women.

    Cook and his colleague, attorney Jamalyn Ollinger, tried to pin the blame for Sharpe's murder on notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who once confessed to killing Sharpe in 1986.

    But Lucas, who died of natural causes in 2001 while on Death Row in Texas, also confessed to killing 600 other men, women and children in the mid-1980s. Most detectives came to believe that a majority of Lucas' confessions were fabricated.

    Watta was first identified as a suspect in the Sharpe case in 2001 when his DNA matched crime scene evidence that had been submitted by cold-case detectives to a national database.

    DNA evidence was not available to law enforcement in the 1980s.

    Watta was serving a term in a Florida prison for shooting and attempting to murder his then-girlfriend, when he was linked to the Sharpe murder.

    Senior Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin argued that the DNA evidence excluded Lucas as a suspect and included Watta. Yellin told the jury that the odds that someone other than Watta left the DNA found on Sharpe's body were less than one in a trillion.

    http://www.ocregister.com/articles/w...5-murder-lucas

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Counsel was appointed to represent Watta on direct appeal on July 18, 2012.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...doc_no=S170001

  4. #4
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    On April 18, 2018, Watta filed his initial brief on direct appeal before the California Supreme Court.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...pTICAgCg%3D%3D

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    The prosecution filed its response on the 11th of December 2018.

    https://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca....pTICAgCg%3D%3D

  6. #6
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    This case has been fully briefed on direct appeal since the 1st of June 2021.

    https://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca....pTICAgCg%3D%3D

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