Jurors Lead the Way on Issue of the Mentally Ill

Even for killers, you couldn’t have found two less popular defendants. One drove his car through a fence and into a day-care playground, killing two toddlers. The other left home, armed with an assault rifle, and then killed an unsuspecting sheriff’s deputy with a barrage of bullets.

Orange County prosecutors asked for and got first-degree murder convictions. In each case, they asked for the death penalty as punishment for killing members of two of society’s most protected classes -- children and law enforcement officers.

Once upon a time, you’d have to think juries in this conservative, law-and-order county would have delivered just that on a silver platter.

But in both cases -- the more recent being last week -- juries rejected capital punishment, citing the defendants’ mental illness.

Knowing for a fact you can’t get a 12-member bleeding-heart jury in Orange County, I’m left to wonder why our citizens are so noticeably out in front of the district attorney’s office in recognizing mental illness and seeking appropriate penalties.

I talked to a member of the jury that said yes to convicting Maurice Steskal of first-degree murder for killing Sheriff’s Deputy Brad Riches but no to executing him. Instead, it voted 11 to 1 for life imprisonment, prompting the judge to order a mistrial and the prosecutor to say he’d try again for the death penalty.

What struck me was how much juror Lee Jarvis, a 63-year-old financial planner from Fullerton, sounded like two jurors I’d interviewed in November 2000 after their wrenching experience in the case of Steven Allen Abrams. Their jury convicted Abrams of first-degree murder in the Costa Mesa day-care deaths of two preschoolers but spared him the death penalty.

“Unfortunately in our system, we don’t do anything for the mentally ill,” Jarvis said, and he can be forgiven for a bit of overstatement. “They’re put in the street, or they’re housed in prison, because something like this [Steskal’s crime] happens. That’s our mental health system.”

I raised the prospect of a softhearted jury. “No question, this was no bleeding-heart jury,” Jarvis said.

“In fact, I was surprised people came to this conclusion [11 votes to reject the death penalty] fairly quickly. Let’s assume we really were sympathetic to the defendant. We could have found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter. We were possibly too harsh with the first-degree murder charge.”

Jarvis said he harbors no illusion that Steskal will get the treatment he needs in prison. To the contrary, he assumes Steskal’s mental demons will come roaring out from time to time.

I asked Jarvis if the district attorney should have pushed for the death penalty. “If I were the prosecutor, I wouldn’t have,” Jarvis said, adding it was “very clear” Steskal suffered from a mental illness. Jarvis lamented the fact that the prosecutor “expressed no sympathy whatsoever for this man’s mental illness,” but said that might reflect the majority societal view.

“The public has a very bad attitude about mental illness,” Jarvis said. “They’re afraid of it; they want it out of sight, out of mind.”

Jarvis, who helps senior citizens with financial matters, said society understands and sympathizes with older people who have mental illnesses, but not those in their 40s, like Steskal.

And in this case, he said, the endgame became a horrible tragedy.

“This was the logical conclusion to this person’s mental illness,” Jarvis said. “Really, it is. When someone has a semiautomatic rifle as his constant companion, that alone should have set off alarm bells.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.