The one-time Modesto fertilizer salesman sat motionless and relatively stoic while the verdicts were read and members of Laci's family hugged and shed tears of relief.
Peterson's distraught and ailing mother, Jackie Peterson, had steadfastly maintained her son's innocence and had to be helped from the courtroom a few minutes before the verdict was read in the Northern California courtroom. She composed herself and re-entered for the reading of the verdict, however.
"There were so many tears around me," Court TV reporter Beth Karras recounted after she pushed her way out of the packed courtroom and into the buzzing throng of spectators and reporters who heard the reading of the verdict over loudspeakers outside the courthouse in Redwood City.
The crowd applauded and broke into chants of "Shar-on, Shar-on," when Sharon Rocha, Laci's mother, was hustled from the courthouse to the district attorney's office after the 9-minute hearing. The jury will reconvene Nov. 22 for the penalty phase of the trial, at which time the panel will be asked to recommend sentencing Peterson to death or to life in prison without parole. The trial judge, Stanislaus County Superior Court Judge Al Delucci, has the final say on which sentence will be handed down.
There was no immediate word on appeals, which are automatic when a death sentence is imposed. Observers expect the jurors' firsthand examination of Peterson's fishing boat to be challenged as an improper experiment by the jurors.
The path to San Quentin's death row was cleared for Peterson by the California law that allows defendants to be charged with murder in the death of an unborn child even though the fetus is not considered a person.
California's death-penalty law has been crafted over the years to reserve execution for only the most heinous of killings by requiring that a slaying include an element taken from a list of "special circumstances."Killings committed, for example, in the heat of passion or during an argument between two parties are not considered death-penalty cases. By contrast, killings that have a greater degree of premeditation and callousness tend to include one of the dreaded special circumstances, such as killing a police officer, fatal ambushes, slayings carried out during a robbery or for financial gain such as insurance benefits, and incidents of multiple deaths.
When Peterson was charged with two counts of murder last spring, it made him eligible for execution but raised the question of how terminating a fetus through abortion could be legal while at the same the death of an unborn child caused by the killing of the mother could be a capital crime.
The answer was found in the wording of the law that codifies the death of a fetus as a homicide. The law states specifically that causing the death of a fetus is considered murder but takes care not to call the fetus a "child" or a "person," which has thus far prevented right-to-life activists from linking the legal definition of murder to the act of abortion.
The statute replaces earlier laws in which only children already born could be considered to have been legal murdered. But the law was changed to cover a fetus after the 1996 slaying of Teresa Keeler, a Stockton woman who was killed by her ex-husband who was enraged that she was pregnant by another man.
