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Thread: Richard Raymond Ramirez - California Death Row

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    Richard Raymond Ramirez - California Death Row


    Richard Raymond Ramirez


    Prosecutors to seek death again in 1983 alley slaying

    SANTA ANA – Orange County prosecutors will seek a second death penalty against a convicted rapist charged with sexually assaulting and murdering a 22-year-old woman in an alley behind a Garden Grove bar in 1983, the district attorney's office announced Monday.

    The first death penalty handed down in 1985 by an Orange County judge to Richard Raymond Ramirez, now 52, was reversed on appeal by a Federal District judge in 2008.

    Ramirez, who has a prior conviction for rape, is charged with special circumstances murder in the commission of rape and sexual assault, plus felony rape and a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a deadly weapon.

    His second trial before an Orange County jury is scheduled to get under way on Jan. 6 before Superior Court Judge William Froeberg.

    He is charged with killing Kim Gonzalez, 22, on the night of Nov. 20, 1983 outside Mr. Barry's Bar in Garden Grove after an evening of drinking when he accosted her in the alley as she left the bar.

    Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin contends that Ramirez sexually assaulted Gonzales before he stabbed her 19 times. Gonzalez's body was found in the alley the next morning. She was naked from the waist down with her pants and underwear pulled down near her ankles and knees.

    Fingerprints were later retrieved from a Budweiser beer bottle 15 feet from the victim's body and matched to Ramirez, prosecutors said.

    He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in 1985.

    But in February 2008, Federal District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall overturned Ramirez's conviction, ruling that a juror in the original trial failed to reveal he had filed an application to be a law enforcement officer, even though he was never asked by the defense attorney.

    http://www.ocregister.com/news/ramir...ath-judge.html

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    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Ramirez is simply not going to be executed making this decision pointless. One of the most horrible cases that has ended up being reversed but if at the end of the day, Ramirez is not going to lie down on that guerny and be lethally injected then there is no need to continue pursuing this as a death penalty case.

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    This is Richard Raymond Ramirez of Orange County. NOT Serial Killer Richard Ramirez.

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    OC officials keep inmate alive but seek execution

    A man charged with raping and killing a woman 30 years ago is being kept alive in Orange County with dialysis treatments until officials can win permission to execute him.

    Richard Raymond Ramirez, 53, who has liver and kidney disease, is taken from the county jail to a hospital for the life-saving treatment twice a week.

    Federal law and court rulings require the jail to provide proper medical treatment for all inmates, county Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

    Meanwhile, prosecutors are preparing for his trial and intend to seek the death penalty.

    "This is the ultimate irony of the death penalty," his public defender, Mick Hill, told the Orange County Register (http://bit.ly/10G4iAh ) last week. "They are keeping my client alive so they can kill him. It's a complete waste."

    Ramirez already was a convicted rapist when he was charged with the 1983 rape and stabbing of 22-year-old Kimberly Gonsale in an alley behind a Garden Grove bar. He spent most of the past 30 years on death row at San Quentin prison, but in 2008 a federal judge overturned his conviction and death penalty on grounds of juror misconduct.

    Attorneys are in the midst of jury selection for a new trial and are looking at more than 850 prospective panelists. The trial could begin next month and run through mid-June.

    The district attorney's office is seeking the death penalty.

    "This murder and his life of crime, regardless of the passage of time or his current medical condition, deserve the ultimate punishment," Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin said. "I guarantee you that the devastating impact of Kim's murder has not diminished one bit among those who loved her."

    http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/art...#ixzz2RktIa7Tg
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    Man convicted in 1983 rape, murder

    SANTA ANA - An Orange County jury deliberated for six hours Wednesday before convicting a former death-row inmate of special circumstances murder for raping and stabbing to death a young woman in an alley behind a Garden Grove bar nearly 30 years ago.

    (Source: The Orange County Register)

    [You have to be a subscriber to get the full story]

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    Jury deadlocks in penalty phase of 1983 bar slaying

    A mistrial was declared Monday after jurors announced they were hopelessly deadlocked in the death-penalty phase of a trial for a man convicted of raping and stabbing a 22-year-old bank teller in an alley behind a Garden Grove bar in 1983.

    Richard Raymond Ramirez, 53, will remain in custody pending a July 19 hearing before Superior Court Judge William Froeberg to determine if he should face a third penalty trial for the murder of Kimberly Gonsalez in November 1983.

    The forewoman of the jury of seven women and five men, which deliberated about two days, told Froeberg the panel deadlocked at 7-5 in favor of the death penalty. Jurors then rushed from the 10th-floor courtroom without comment.

    About a dozen members of Gonsalez’s family sat solemnly in the courtroom when the mistrial was declared.

    “It’s so disappointing,” said Yvette Mejia, Gonsalez’s sister. “Now we have to do this all over again. It’s so hard.”

    Ramirez was convicted by the same jury last month of murder for raping and stabbing Gonsalez to death after spending the evening with her one Sunday in November 1983 at Mr. Barry’s bar in the Plaza de Pueblo shopping center in Garden Grove.

    Witnesses described how Ramirez and Gonsalez drank and danced and kissed in a darkened booth in the back of the bar before leaving together, through a back door, into an alley about 1 a.m. A passer-by found Gonsalez’s semi-nude body about two hours later in a dark area between two buildings. She had been raped and stabbed so viciously that her spinal cord was severed. There was a half-full, longneck bottle of Budweiser, upright, on the pavement near her body.

    Ramirez, who was known by his moniker “Mousy,” was quickly linked to the attack by a fingerprint on the bottle. Detectives also learned that he had a prior conviction for a violent rape in Merced in 1977. The victim in that case told police that Ramirez broke into her house, sexually assaulted her repeatedly and then threatened to cut off her baby’s legs if she didn’t give him money.

    This was the second penalty-phase trial for Ramirez, who is not the similarly named “night stalker.”

    He was first convicted and sentenced to death for murdering Gonsalez in 1985, and spent most of the past three decades on death row. U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall overturned that sentence in 2008, ruling that a juror in the original trial failed to reveal he had filed an application to be an FBI agent.

    In the retrial, Ramirez admitted through his attorneys, deputy public defenders Seth Bank and Mick Hill, that he sexually assaulted and murdered Gonsalez. But in the penalty phase, Hill argued to spare Ramirez’s life, saying that he was the product of a horrible childhood in which his family lived in fear of his violent, abusive and alcoholic father.

    Hill said Ramirez’s father suffered traumatic damage while serving in the Korean War and came back to torture and torment his wife, Ramirez’s mother, with verbal and physical abuse before she divorced him while Ramirez was a teenager.

    Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin implored the jury to impose death.

    He argued that Ramirez was a repeat sexual offender who never showed sympathy for his victims and instead took pleasure in their pain, suffering and humiliation.

    http://occrimedefender.com/jury-dead...3-bar-slaying/
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    Whittier Family Fights For 3rd Time To Get A Rapist-Killer The Death Penalty

    WHITTIER (CBSLA.com) — Thirty years ago, Kimberly Gonzales was raped and murdered — beaten with a beer bottle and stabbed to death.

    Don’t tell her family time heals all wounds.

    They want Richard Raymond Ramirez, now 53, to get the death penalty. He’s been in prison since 1983.

    KCAL9′s Juan Fernandez spoke to family members who said justice will not be served unless Ramirez is put to death for the rape and murder.

    Ramirez was tried three times. All three juries found him guilty. But none of the juries has been able to agree on a sentence. The first time the jury was hopelessly deadlocked and couldn’t reach a unanimous decision.

    A second jury convicted him, but he asked for an appeal and his conviction was overturned on a technicality.

    The last jury, just this past year, couldn’t agree whether Ramirez should get the death penalty or life behind bars.

    The family visited Gonzales’ grave site Thursday.

    “I want to yell out, I want to scream,” said the victim’s sister Yvette Mejia. “I want to tell all these jurors how foolish they were. How very foolish.”

    “We are still pushing for the death penalty,” said Alicia Valdez, another one of Gonzales’ sisters. “So is the district attorney. We’re all in agreement that that is what he should get. He deserves that.”

    The family must wait for another jury to be impaneled for another penalty phase.

    The victim’s mom, Helen Hernandez, says all of these trials weigh on the family, and it gets no easier to relieve the horrific way in which Kimberly died.

    “It’s horrible to see your child that way,” said Hernandez. “Very, very, very horrible.”

    Fernandez reports that the judge handling the case has a very busy docket and that the earliest this case’s penalty phase can be heard is early in 2014.

    http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/...death-penalty/

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    Attorneys seek to expand hearing in Seal Beach mass shooting case

    A defense attorney who has alleged a wide-ranging conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of Orange County defendants, including the man guilty of the worst mass killing in the county’s history, wants to broaden his probe while prosecutors told a judge overseeing an evidentiary hearing that enough is enough.

    Senior Deputy District Attorney Howard Gundy implored Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals Monday to cut short the hearing, which has lingered on and off again since March, and make a ruling on Scott Dekraai’s allegations, through his attorneys, of outrageous governmental misconduct.

    The conflict stems from the use of a jailhouse snitch to question Dekraai after his arrest for the massacre in Seal Beach that killed eight and nearly claimed a ninth victim.

    “We are now so far afield of Scott Dekraai it’s just unbelievable,” Gundy said.

    Gundy ridiculed the allegations from Dekraai’s attorneys as a “very rickety conspiracy,” and he insisted there’s “no evidence of a conspiracy” in the Dekraai case.

    “It’s a complete fabrication,” Gundy said.

    A jailhouse informant’s placement next to Dekraai was a “complete coincidence,” Gundy said.

    Goethals said he was “a little skeptical of coincidences,” but did not elaborate.

    Dekraai’s attorney, Scott Sanders of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, thinks otherwise and wants Goethals to allow him to have two more prosecutors and sheriff’s officials testify in the case.

    On Thursday, in what is considered a highly unusual move, Goethals is allowing Sanders to cross-examine former federal prosecutor and now Orange County Superior Court Judge Terri Flynn-Peister.

    Gundy also denied Sanders’ allegation that there were violations involving the handing over of evidence to defense attorneys in the Dekraai case. Putting the jailhouse informant within reach of Dekraai to question him could be a violation of the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights, Sanders has argued.

    Sanders said he would like to question two extra witnesses about what he suspects is systemic abuse on the part of prosecutors and sheriff’s officials of jailhouse informants.

    “The real issue here is how the special handling unit and the District Attorney’s Office deals with evidence that is not in their favor,” Sanders told Goethals.

    Sanders ultimately wants Goethals to take the Orange County District Attorney’s Office off the prosecution of Dekraai or to punish the District Attorney’s Office by not allowing it to pursue the death penalty against his client.

    The dispute has spilled over into another death penalty case. Attorneys for Richard Raymond Ramirez are seeking information about the use of another jailhouse informant, Alex Frosio, and a different judge is set to discuss that on Friday.

    In both Dekraai’s and Ramirez’s case, the two defendants have been convicted so the only issue is whether they would be sent to Death Row.

    Senior Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin was angered by allegations that he did not comply with his obligations to turn over evidence to defense attorneys, known in court terms as a Brady violation.

    “That’s not how I do business,” Yellin told City News Service.

    Yellin said he sent an investigator to speak with Frosio when it was brought to his attention that the informant had spoken with Ramirez and wanted to help prosecutors.

    “We specifically asked him about notes, did you take notes on Ramirez,” Yellin said, adding Frosio denied taking any notes about his discussions with Ramirez, but then changed his mind and said he had.

    That led Yellin to believe Frosio was lying and untrustworthy. The prosecutor has no interest in having Frosio testify.

    Ramirez was convicted in March 1985 of first-degree murder and sex counts and was sentenced to death in July 1985. However, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall overturned the conviction, because the jury foreman failed to notify the court that he had applied for a job with the FBI -- a position he was hired for months after the trial.

    Last June, Froeberg declared a mistrial when jurors said they were split 7-5 in favor of the death penalty.

    In Sanders’ most recent motion in the Dekraai case he alleges Frosio was used to testify before a grand jury in an unrelated case, which resulted in an indictment, but that the notes Frosio took were never turned over to defense attorneys.

    Dekraai pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder and a count of attempted murder in May. The penalty phase of his trial is scheduled for August.

    http://www.presstelegram.com/general...-shooting-case
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    Jury to decide death penalty in 1983 Garden Grove killing

    More than 30 years after raping a woman and stabbing her to death in a desolate alley behind a Garden Grove bar, a convicted killer once again faces the possibility of returning to death row.

    Jurors will decide whether Richard Raymond Ramirez should spend the rest of his life in prison or be sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 22-year-old Kimberly Gonzalez in November 1983.

    Ramirez met Gonzalez at Mr. Barry's Bar on Westminster Avenue, played pool and danced with her, kissed her and then walked with her to an alley behind the business where attacked her and stabbed her more than 20 times.

    “As she fought for her life, that man raped her, stabbed her and killed her,” Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin told a jury Wednesday in the Santa Ana courthouse. “For that he deserves the ultimate penalty.”

    Prints on a beer bottle found near her body led police to Ramirez, and DNA evidence processed years later tied him to the rape.

    Ramirez’s attorney acknowledged that his client killed Gonzalez, warning the jury that facts that will arise during the ongoing trial will only worsen their view of Ramirez. The attorney asked the jurors to try to understand the trauma’s that shaped Ramirez life in deciding whether to sentence him to death, however.

    “He has spent the last 31 years in prison, every single hour, every single day. We are not asking that he be anywhere else,” Deputy Public Defender Mick Hill told the jury. “He deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. He just doesn’t deserve the death penalty.”

    Ramirez grew up in a home dominated by his alcoholic and abusive father, a man left permanently damaged by his time in the Korean War, Hill said. His mother, who endured constant beatings and at times rapes during her relationship with Ramirez’s father, ultimately escaped the relationship, only to leave her children to fend on their own, as she tried to enjoy her newfound freedom, the attorney added.

    Hill acknowledged that Ramirez had been tried as a juvenile for the rape of another woman. The rape and killing of Gonzalez occured shortly after Ramirez was released from the California Youth Authority.

    A jury in 1985 convicted Ramirez of rape, sodomy and murder, and he was sent to San Quentin. The conviction was overturned in 2008, however, when a federal judge determined that the jury foreman had lied about his job status, not telling the court that he was a candidate for a job with the FBI, a position he later attained.

    Prosecutors decided to re-try the case. Ramirez was convicted for a second time in 2013. But a jury that same year deadlocked on whether he should receive the death penalty, leading the judge to declare a mistrial.

    http://www.ocregister.com/articles/r...eath-jury.html
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    Jurors deliberate death penalty of man convicted in 1983 Garden Grove rape, murder

    Jury members are weighing the fate of a convicted killer who raped a woman and stabbed her to death in a desolate alley behind a Garden Grove bar in 1983, beginning deliberations Tuesday on whether he should return to death row.

    Nearly 30 years after he was first convicted in the death of 22-year-old Kimberly Gonzalez, the life of Richard Raymond Ramirez is once again in the balance, as the jury decides whether he should get the death penalty or serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    Gonzalez met Ramirez at Mr. Barry's Bar in Garden Grove in November 1983, where he danced with her, kissed her, then walked her into a dirty alley behind the business where he stabbed her more than 20 times and sexually assaulted her.

    The case has taken a circuitous route through the criminal justice system. Ramirez was first convicted in 1985 and spent several decades at San Quentin before the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2008. He was convicted again last year, but that jury deadlocked on whether Ramirez should receive the death penalty, causing a mistrial.

    During the current trial, Ramirez's attorney acknowledged that he is guilty of the rape and murder, along with the rape at knife point of another woman several years earlier. The attorney argued, however, that Ramirez's upbringing in a severely dysfunctional family dominated by an alcoholic and violent father, as well Ramirez's year's of drug abuse beginning in his teens, should give the jury enough reason to spare his client's life.

    "He deserves to spend every second of every day in jail, and that is where I want you to send him," Deputy Public Defender Mick Hill told the jury during his closing arguments on Tuesday. "He does not deserve to have a lethal injection put in the same veins he used to poison himself as a child."

    Prosecutors argued that his history of violence and the callousness toward his victims warranted the ultimate punishment. During his closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin showed the jury photos of Gonzalez's lifeless body left sprawled in the dingy and dark alley, her clothes covered in blood and her pants and underwear pulled down to her feet and knees.

    "Don't let him take the sympathy that belongs to her," Yellin said. "He has already taken her life, don't let him take that."

    http://www.ocregister.com/articles/r...ury-death.html

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