A man accused of killing a Los Angeles police officer during a traffic stop four decades ago has been convicted again in a retrial this week.
Jurors deliberated for two weeks before finding Kenneth Gay, 65, guilty of murdering Officer Paul Verna in 1983. Gay, who has been incarcerated roughly four decades already, will serve a life sentence because he was convicted of murder with special circumstances.
“It’s not exactly happiness. We’ve been in trial for 11 weeks and to have the jury be out so long, it was agonizing,” Sandy Jackson, Verna's widow, told the Los Angeles Times. “But the end result was what it should be. (Gay) should not be out among us.”
Prosecutors said Gay and his co-defendant, Raynard Cummings, were passengers in a car that Verna, a motorcycle officer, stopped for speeding through a stop sign in Lake View Terrace, a suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.
Prosecutors said the two men, who had committed more than a dozen robberies in the weeks prior, thought Verna would arrest them because they were armed ex-convicts riding in a stolen car.
Verna wrote down Pamela Cummings’ name — a crucial move that later helped detectives solve the murder — and leaned into the car to ask Cummings and Gay for identification. Fear of being arrested, Cummings fired the first shot and then, prosecutors say, passed the gun to Gay, who jumped out of the car to pump another five bullets into the officer.
The original trial was held in 1985 and separate juries convicted Cummings and Gay, who each accused the other of being the shooter, and recommended the death penalty. Three years later, the state Supreme Court overturned Gay’s death sentence on the grounds of incompetent counsel, but left the guilty verdict in place.
The court again sentenced Gay to death in 2000 after a retrial just for the penalty phase of the case. The high court overturned that, too, and later the justices unanimously decided to vacate Gay’s initial guilty conviction. The justices wrote that Gay’s attorney, who was later disbarred and has since died, among other things, did not introduce crucial evidence that might have swayed the jury to come to a different verdict.
Gay had insisted on his innocence and maintained that Cummings was the lone shooter. Cummings remains incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison.
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