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Timothy McGhee (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).
A well-known gang leader from Los Angeles who was connected to nine different murders, including three that led to his conviction, saw those convictions and his death sentence reversed by the California Supreme Court last week.
Timothy McGhee, aged 51, was originally convicted in 2009 for three killings and the attempted murder of two officers. He once appeared on the U.S. Marshals’ most-wanted list after vanishing in 2001, and was later apprehended by police in Arizona in 2003.
The three murder charges that were overturned dated from 1997 to 2001. Authorities believed that McGhee, as a leader of the Toonerville gang active in LA since the 1950s per the Los Angeles Times, leveraged violence and fear to dominate the drug trade and intimidate local residents around Los Feliz Boulevard between the Los Angeles River and San Fernando Boulevard.
One of the victims, Ronnie Martin, 25, was allegedly shot 28 times by McGhee and several other members of the Toonerville gang. Another victim named Ryan Gonzalez, 17, was gunned down in 2000. The third was killed in 2001.
“The one quality that I have seen in him that I have not seen before is a quality that is more typical of a serial killer: They enjoy killing,” said Deputy District Attorney Hoon Chun in 2009, according to the LA Times. “He seemed to enjoy killing,” Chun said about McGhee, who was reportedly compared to Charles Manson by a former Los Angeles Police Department detective.
“Basically, he’s a monster,” former LAPD Det. Andy Teague told the Times in 2001.
At his sentencing, Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry ripped McGhee for treating the act of murder “as some kind of perverse sport, as if he was hunting human game,” per the Times.
“He is a committed killer and an obvious danger to society,” Perry said.
Despite all this, the California Supreme Court chose to reverse McGhee’s convictions and death sentence last Thursday — saying a member of the jury that convicted him was wrongly removed by Perry after other jurors came forward and accused the individual of being incapable of making a fair decision in the case.
The juror in question allegedly expressed his distrust of law enforcement while deliberating with the others and told them, “I am not changing my mind,” according to the Supreme Court. The California justices ruled unanimously to overturn McGhee’s convictions and sentence and sent his case back down to the Los Angeles County’s district attorney, who has not yet said whether he plans to re-try McGhee or seek the death penalty again.
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“In this case, the court stated that several jurors complained Juror No. 5 was not making sense or was being irrational,” wrote Justice Goodwin Liu in the court’s ruling. “We have observed that ‘[t]he circumstance that a juror does not deliberate well or relies upon faulty logic or analysis does not constitute a refusal to deliberate and is not a ground for discharge,”” Liu explained, citing prior case law. “But we need not go that far here because there was an evidentiary basis for Juror No. 5’s concerns regarding the credibility of the witnesses who were central to the prosecution’s case.”
According to the Supreme Court, proving that McGhee was the shooter in the various incidents that he was charged for “depended on the trier of fact giving significant weight to the testimony of a limited number of witnesses to those crimes.”
Liu stated that there was evidence presented at the trial “calling into question those witnesses’ credibility” and when viewing the record in its entirety the court concluded that the discharge of Juror No. 5 for failing to deliberate “is not manifestly supported by the evidence on which the court actually relied.”
“The trial court explained in its ruling that the parties deserved to have jurors who would not engage in a ‘blanket disregard of one side’s evidence,’” Liu said. “But the record does not show that is what happened here. … In light of the totality of the evidence as well as the ‘more comprehensive and less deferential’ standard of review that applies to a claim of error based on the dismissal of a juror for failing to perform his or her duty, we cannot say that the record shows to a demonstrable reality that Juror No. 5 exhibited an improper bias against law enforcement or the prosecution warranting his removal.”
Liu and the court concluded, “We hold that the trial court erred in removing Juror No. 5 from the jury during guilt phase deliberations and that the error requires reversal of the judgment.”
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The Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office told local NBC affiliate KNBC that it is reviewing the Supreme Court ruling and weighing what to do next.
“Our office is currently reviewing the Court’s ruling in detail,” LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a statement. “We will make a determination regarding whether to retry the case in the near future.”
Online court records show that McGhee is currently locked up at Kern Valley State Prison. The Times reports that he is expected to remain there indefinitely as McGhee is serving an additional life sentence handed down to him under California’s three strikes law.
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