Alejandro Avila was a 27-year-old assembly worker from Lake Elsinore, in southwestern Riverside County, when the Orange County Sheriff's Department arrested him in July 2002 for the kidnapping and murder of Samantha Runnion in the city of Stanton. Eighteen months earlier, a jury in his own county had acquitted him on every count of an unrelated case. That acquittal became one of the central legal questions of his trial and of his appeal.
An Orange County Superior Court jury convicted him on April 28, 2005, of murder, with other charges, and found two special circumstances true. On May 16, 2005, the same jury returned a verdict of death, and on July 22, 2005, the trial court denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict and sentenced him to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment unanimously on June 30, 2014, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review it the following March. He pleaded not guilty and contested the case at every stage. In November 2026, after more than seven years in which California carried out no executions under a gubernatorial moratorium, Governor Gavin Newsom named him among 548 people whose death sentences he intended to commute to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Avila was born in about 1975; he was 27 at the time of his arrest and 30 when he was convicted. His exact date and place of birth are not on record. By 2002 he lived in Lake Elsinore, a lake town in Riverside County, staying at different times with his mother, with one of his sisters and with a girlfriend. Since the previous September he had worked as an assembler at a plant in Temecula, a few miles to the south, run by a manufacturer of cardiac medical devices. He was tall and heavily built, six feet and about 200 pounds.
Riverside County prosecutors brought an unrelated case against him in about 2000. It went to trial in Riverside County, and in January 2001 the jury acquitted him on all counts. Avila left the courtroom with no conviction of any kind on his record.
The acquittal stood as a legal fact through everything that followed. No court ever set it aside, and the California Supreme Court, when it came to review his later conviction, treated it as a full acquittal. What the acquittal did not do, as the courts would later rule, was keep the evidence behind those charges out of a later trial on different charges. No new Riverside County prosecution followed his arrest.
The crimes charged against Avila took place in Stanton, a city in northwestern Orange County, on July 15, 2002. The victim was Samantha Runnion. A young witness gave investigators a description of the man responsible, and from that description a police artist produced a composite drawing that television stations broadcast.
The Orange County Sheriff's Department led the investigation. About 400 officers took part, working through some 2,000 leads, and federal investigators helped examine the physical evidence. Tips came in by the thousand. One came from a woman in Riverside County who saw the composite on the news and told police the man in the drawing might be Avila.
Investigators built the case quickly from records and physical evidence that, the prosecution later said, placed him in the area that evening. On Friday, July 19, 2002, four days after the crime, members of the investigative team served warrants in Lake Elsinore and arrested him. The sheriff announced the arrest that day; his public statements about the case in the months that followed were later cited by the defense in asking for the trial to be moved.
The case reached far beyond Stanton. The President of the United States spoke about it publicly. National television networks covered it. Twelve years later the California Supreme Court noted that the national networks had covered the case and that most of the coverage came about two and a half years before the venue hearing.
Orange County prosecutors charged Avila in Orange County Superior Court with murder, with other charges: kidnapping and two counts of a further offense against a child. The charges alleged special circumstances that made the case eligible for the death penalty under California law: that the murder was committed while the defendant was engaged in the crime of kidnapping, and that it was committed while he was engaged in the commission of a further offense against a child under the age of 14. In late July 2002 the District Attorney announced at a news conference in Santa Ana that his office would seek a sentence of death. Avila, appearing in Orange County Superior Court in custody, pleaded not guilty to every count.
The case moved slowly from there. On September 16, 2002, the judge then presiding over the pretrial proceedings refused a request by news organizations to allow cameras and audio recording in the courtroom up to and including the preliminary hearing, then set for October 11. The court gave as its reason the risk that more coverage would taint the pool of potential jurors. Both the defense and the victim's family had opposed cameras. The case was then delayed many times, and in December 2004, more than two years after the arrest, it was still in pretrial hearings.
Before trial the defense moved for a change of venue. Its motion rested on the scale of the coverage, on the sheriff's repeated public statements about the case, and on the President's public comments about the case. The defense commissioned a telephone survey of Orange County residents, and the prosecution answered with a survey of its own. The two pollsters agreed that a large share of the county's residents had heard of the case. They disagreed sharply about what that meant for the chance of a fair trial.
The trial court denied the motion without prejudice, which left the defense free to renew it as jury selection went forward. It renewed it several times, the last time after the alternate jurors had been chosen, and each time the court denied it. The court accepted the results of the defense poll but not the conclusions the defense drew from them. It found weaknesses in both surveys, and it said that questioning prospective jurors in court was a better measure of prejudice than calls placed at random to county residents. Before jury selection began, the judge guessed that about half of the people summoned would not recognize the case. In fact, the court later recalled, only about 20 to 25 percent had not heard of it.
During jury selection, a Los Angeles talk-radio program spent airtime urging a death verdict. The court responded by questioning prospective jurors about whether they had listened to it and by taking steps to keep its effect out of the courtroom. About 150 prospective jurors were questioned in person, after filling out a written questionnaire that gave them the basic facts of the case and asked what they had read, seen and heard. Many were excused for a variety of reasons, exposure to publicity among them, and the court excused those whose memories of the coverage were strongest.
The defense used all of its peremptory challenges. It then asked the court for additional ones so it could remove six more seated jurors. Asked to explain the request, defense counsel pointed only to the jurors' exposure to publicity and to the fact that several had shown in their questionnaires more knowledge of the case than the court's summary had given them. Counsel confirmed that this was the only ground.
The court denied the request. On the record, none of the six recalled much. One had seen something about the case on television and remembered nothing specific. One had seen a television interview with the victim's mother long before and remembered nothing about Avila. One had heard of it only briefly on the news. One knew only that a man had been arrested. One recalled no details. The sixth called his knowledge sketchy and said he occasionally heard the radio program in a carpool and would ask to change the station. Every one of them told the court that they had formed no opinion about guilt. A jury of eight men and four women was sworn.
The trial opened in Santa Ana in the spring of 2005, about two years and nine months after the crime. The prosecution, led by the District Attorney, presented physical evidence, records and testimony that it said tied Avila to the crime.
The most contested ruling of the trial concerned the earlier case. Over defense objection, the judge allowed the prosecution to present evidence of the conduct alleged in the 2001 Riverside County case, together with a further witness's account. The defense argued, at trial and later on appeal, that the acquittal should have kept that evidence out.
The defense case was a direct challenge to the identification. Defense counsel called the evidence weak and circumstantial. The defense argued that the timeline did not allow Avila to have committed the crime, that features of the vehicle and other evidence did not clearly match him, and that the scientific testing on which the prosecution relied was unreliable. It suggested that investigators had planted part of the evidence, an accusation the prosecution denied. The defense called witnesses who had seen other vehicles in the area, witnesses whose accounts of Avila's movements that evening and the following day suggested nothing unusual, and family members who said they had noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
The jury deliberated for less than nine hours over two days. On Thursday, April 28, 2005, it returned guilty verdicts on every count, murder, kidnapping and the two further counts, and found both special circumstances true. Avila bowed his head toward the defense table as the verdicts were read and showed no visible reaction. Because the jury had found the special circumstances true, the case moved to a penalty phase in which the same jurors would choose between death and life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The penalty phase began in early May 2005. The prosecution called the victim's mother and grandmother, who testified briefly about the child and about the effect of her death on the family, and the mother identified eight photographs of her daughter taken during her life. The defense objected to the photographs; the court admitted them.
The defense asked the jury to spare his life. Its case in mitigation described a childhood of poverty and abuse in a family it presented as troubled across generations, and argued that the crime had been impulsive, not planned. Relatives testified, two psychologists testified about his background and its effects on him, and other witnesses spoke to his good qualities. The prosecution answered with a forensic psychiatrist, who testified in rebuttal about Avila's psychological makeup and his capacity to choose how he acted.
One legal limit shaped this phase. California law bars a penalty jury from weighing, as aggravation, criminal activity of which the defendant was acquitted. The court therefore told the jury that the evidence from the 2001 case could not be used to determine the penalty, though it could consider the further witness's account.
The jury deliberated for about seven hours over two days. On Monday, May 16, 2005, it returned a verdict of death. The District Attorney and the victim's mother held a news conference in the lobby of the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana immediately afterward. On July 22, 2005, the judge denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict under section 190.4 of the Penal Code and imposed the sentence of death. Avila was 30.
Because the judgment imposed death, the appeal went automatically and directly to the California Supreme Court under section 1239 of the Penal Code. The court decided the case on June 30, 2014, nearly nine years after the sentence.
The opinion, joined by all seven justices who sat on the case, rejected every claim and affirmed the judgment.
On venue, the court applied the familiar test: a change of venue is required when there is a reasonable likelihood that a fair and impartial trial cannot be had in the county. It weighed the considerations its earlier cases required. The nature and gravity of the offense, it held, were as serious as they could be, but the gravity of a crime does not by itself compel a change, because the horror of the crime, not the place of trial, is what arouses sympathy. The coverage was the factor that most favored a change, but by the time of trial it had dissipated, and other cases had taken center stage. The size of the community weighed heavily against a move: Orange County had more than three million residents. Avila was not an Orange County resident and had no known ties to it, and the court found that he was not an outsider in any significant sense. The victim, it noted, had held no particular public standing before the crime. The court declined to presume prejudice, observing that such a presumption attends only the extreme case, and found that the trial had none of the circus atmosphere of the cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States had presumed it. It also held that the radio program did not by itself require a change, and that the verdict itself did not suggest bias.
On the peremptory challenges, the court applied its 1988 decision in People v. Bonin, which requires a defendant who is refused extra challenges to show, at the very least, that without them he is reasonably likely to receive an unfair trial before a partial jury. It reviewed the six jurors one by one, found that none had more than slight knowledge of the case or any preexisting opinion, and held that the mere wish to remove a juror does not show that the juror was biased. The one seated juror who had heard the radio program had known nothing about the case and said the program would not influence him, and the defense had never sought to excuse him.
The claim that drew the closest analysis concerned the evidence from the earlier case. The court held it admissible under section 1108 of the Evidence Code, subject to the balancing test of section 352, and found it probative and not unusually inflammatory. The 2001 acquittal, it held, did not bar the evidence. Relying on the Supreme Court of the United States in Dowling v. United States and on its own decision in People v. Santamaria, it explained that an acquittal establishes only that guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt, while evidence of other conduct needs to meet only the lower standard of a preponderance of the evidence. The protection in section 190.3 against acquitted conduct, it added, governs only the penalty phase, and the trial court had honored it there.
The court also upheld the trial court's other evidentiary rulings. It found the victim-impact testimony brief, not especially emotional and within permissible limits, and the eight photographs within the trial court's discretion. With no error found, the claim of cumulative prejudice failed. The court then rejected, as it had in earlier cases, a series of general challenges to California's death penalty law: that the special circumstances fail to narrow the class of eligible defendants, that the jury must find aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt or unanimously or in writing, that the Constitution requires comparison of sentences across cases, and that the law violates equal protection or international law. Avila had not requested review of whether his sentence was proportionate to his own culpability, and the court noted that such review would not have helped him. "We affirm the judgment," it concluded.
Avila petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of certiorari. On March 30, 2015, the Court denied the petition without comment, which left the California Supreme Court's decision as the final word on the direct appeal.
By then California had not carried out an execution since 2006. Voters kept the death penalty in ballot measures in 2012 and 2016, but in March 2019 Governor Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions. In 2024 the state moved the men on its death row out of their individual cells at San Quentin and distributed them among other state prisons. Avila remained in the custody of the California corrections system throughout.
On November 5, 2026, two months before leaving office, Governor Newsom announced in an open letter that he would commute every death sentence in California, 548 in all, to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The commutation applies only to the death sentence itself: it leaves every conviction and every other part of each sentence in place, along with all restitution orders, and the people who receive it remain in prison and are not eligible for parole.
The Governor's office published a list of the intended recipients with each person's county of conviction, the date of the death judgment and the trial case number. Avila is on it, listed with an Orange County trial, a death judgment dated July 22, 2005, and case number 02CF1862. Under the California Constitution the Governor may not commute the sentence of a person twice convicted of a felony without a recommendation from the California Supreme Court in which at least four justices concur. The Governor's office identified 382 condemned people who met that description, and asked the court for its recommendation in those cases. Avila's name on the published list carries no mark of a second felony conviction, which placed him among the roughly one-third of recipients whose commutations rest on the Governor's authority alone. The documents published that day described the action as proposed and the recipients as intended, with the formal grant still to follow, and a victims' rights group announced that it would challenge the commutations in the state Supreme Court.
Three parts of California law shaped Avila's case from charge to commutation. The first is the special-circumstances statute, section 190.2 of the Penal Code. The two circumstances the jury found true in his case were murder committed during a kidnapping and murder committed during a further offense against a child under 14, both under subdivision (a)(17) of the statute.
The second is the pair of evidence rules that the 2014 opinion reconciled. Section 1108 of the Evidence Code allows the prosecution, in cases of the kind charged in his further counts, to offer evidence of other similar conduct if it survives the balancing test of section 352. Section 190.3 of the Penal Code, which governs the penalty phase, forbids the use of acquitted conduct as aggravation. The Supreme Court held that the first rule governed his guilt trial and the second only his penalty trial, which is why the earlier evidence could be heard on guilt but was removed from the jury's weighing of punishment.
The third is the clemency clause of the state constitution, article V, section 8. It gives the Governor broad power to commute sentences, but it requires the Supreme Court's recommendation for anyone twice convicted of a felony. For the 2026 action, the Governor's staff reviewed state and federal criminal history records for every condemned person and placed on the court list anyone with more than one felony conviction under California law, or a felony conviction elsewhere. The 2001 acquittal left Avila's Riverside County case without a conviction, and the Governor's list did not mark him as twice convicted.
Avila has never admitted the crime, and the defense contested every part of the identification at trial, including the reliability of the scientific evidence and the possibility that part of it was planted. The jury rejected those arguments, and the California Supreme Court upheld the judgment on every point raised.
The Riverside County accusations that led to the 2001 trial remain unproven in law. A jury acquitted him on all counts, and no new charges were brought there after his arrest. The evidence from that case was admitted at the Orange County trial under a lower standard of proof, and the court barred its use at the penalty phase.
His present legal status was unsettled as of November 2026. The Governor had announced the commutation and named him as an intended recipient, but the formal grant was still to follow and a legal challenge had been promised.
About 1975: Alejandro Avila is born.
About 2000: Riverside County prosecutors bring an unrelated case against him.
January 2001: A Riverside County jury acquits him on all counts.
September 2001: He begins work as an assembler at a plant in Temecula.
July 15, 2002: Samantha Runnion is killed; the crimes take place in Stanton, Orange County.
July 19, 2002: The Orange County Sheriff's Department arrests him in Lake Elsinore.
Late July 2002: He is charged in Orange County Superior Court and pleads not guilty; the District Attorney announces that he will seek death.
September 16, 2002: The court bars cameras and audio recording through the preliminary hearing.
March 2005: Jury selection begins in Santa Ana; repeated motions to change venue are denied.
April 28, 2005: The jury convicts him on every count and finds two special circumstances true.
May 16, 2005: The jury returns a verdict of death.
July 22, 2005: The court denies the automatic motion to modify the verdict and sentences him to death.
June 30, 2014: The California Supreme Court affirms the judgment unanimously in People v. Avila, S135855.
March 30, 2015: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari, number 14-8191.
March 2019: Governor Newsom imposes a moratorium on executions in California.
2024: California moves the men on its death row from San Quentin to other state prisons.
November 5, 2026: Governor Newsom names him among 548 intended recipients of commutation to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.