Scott Peterson, convicted of killing his pregnant wife Laci in 2002, asked for a second trial, but the judge denied his request.
After abandoning Laci, who was 27 then, and their unborn baby Conner into San Francisco Bay on Christmas Eve 2002, Peterson was found guilty in 2004.
Her body washed up on the strand despite his pretense that she had vanished.
More than a year ago, the state’s supreme court instructed superior court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo to investigate Peterson’s allegation of improper conduct on the part of the jury.
Richelle Nice, juror number 7, didn’t engage in any misbehavior, and Massullo found no evidence that she had lied about having experienced domestic abuse while pregnant.
Peterson’s legal team said that Nice engaged in “prejudicial misconduct” by withholding information about her past, which included applying for a restraining order years earlier out of fear that her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend intended to harm her unborn child.
Massulo came to the conclusion that while some of Nice’s responses to questions on a jury questionnaire were “false in some respects,” they were not made with prejudice toward Peterson in mind.
Instead, they “were the result of a combination of good faith misunderstanding of the questions and sloppiness in answering,” according to Massulo.
According to Nice’s testimony from February, she “didn’t write that on the form because it never crossed my mind.
It wasn’t done on purpose.
Later, Nice and her fellow jurors published “We, the Jury,” a book about their experiences.
50-year-old Peterson is qualified to challenge Massullo’s decision.
He was found guilty of killing Laci, who was eight months pregnant, in 2004 and given the death penalty the following year.
However, due to concerns about the jury selection process in his initial trial, the state supreme court reversed his sentence in 2020.
A year later, he tried again and was given a life sentence without the possibility of release.
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