Bryan Maurice Jones was convicted by a San Diego County jury in 1994 of the first degree murders of two women, JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover, who died in San Diego in 1986. The same jury convicted him of attempting to murder two other women, both of whom survived and testified, and of forcible rape, sodomy and oral copulation against one of them. It found three special circumstances true: that each murder was committed during the commission or attempted commission of sodomy, and that he had committed multiple murders. On April 6, 1994, after a separate penalty trial, the jury set his punishment at death.
He had also been charged with the murders of two more women, Tara Simpson and Trina Carpenter. The jury could not reach a verdict on either count, and the prosecution did not retry them.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full in August 2013. The case did not end there. A habeas corpus petition he filed in 2014 challenged the way the prosecutor had picked the jury, and in December 2021 the same court held that the San Diego County District Attorney could not withhold the trial prosecutor's jury selection notes from him. The ruling was published as a decision of the state's highest court.
Little is on record about Jones's life outside the crimes. In 1985 and 1986 he lived with his mother in an apartment in San Diego. His mother also worked as a live-in nurse for an elderly woman at a house elsewhere in the city. Jones often spent weekends at that house and had a key to it. The elderly woman died about two weeks before October 20, 1986.
He did not own the car he was later linked to. He sometimes borrowed his sister's 1980 Datsun 280Z, which had faded blue two-tone paint.
One link to Jones came up during jury selection. The prosecutor removed one prospective juror partly because of what he described as her Job Corps connection to Jones, saying he expected that some mitigating evidence related to that organization might be introduced at the penalty phase.
The court's opinion describes all four women named in the murder counts as African-American, and all four died in San Diego between the summer of 1985 and the summer of 1986.
Tara Simpson was 18. She was found on August 29, 1985. Jones was charged with her murder; the jury did not reach a verdict, and the count was not retried.
Trina Carpenter was 22. She was found on February 11, 1986. She had been strangled. Jones was charged with her murder; the jury did not reach a verdict, and the count was not retried.
JoAnn Sweets was 34. She was found on May 9, 1986. She had been strangled. Jones was convicted of her murder.
Sophia Glover was 37. She was found on August 15, 1986. She had been strangled. Jones was convicted of her murder.
Little else is on record about who these women were. One detail about JoAnn Sweets surfaced because the defense raised it at trial: she had a former boyfriend, whom the defense put forward as a possible suspect in her death. DNA testing offered by the prosecution in rebuttal excluded him.
Three other women were attacked and lived, and all three testified at the 1994 trial.
The first attack took place on August 15, 1985. The woman reported it to police, and Jones was taken into custody. He was released a few days later. She did not appear for an interview with the district attorney's office and later said she did not mean to pursue the case, so no charge was filed at the time. The facts of her report survived in the paperwork of a later case: they were mentioned in the sentencing documents prepared in 1987. In January 1993 the District Attorney charged Jones with her attempted murder.
The second attack took place on October 16, 1986. Jones was tried separately for that attack, convicted of several felonies, and sentenced in 1987 to 22 years in prison. That conviction was not part of the 1994 case, but the trial court let the woman testify about what happened to her as evidence of identity, motive and intent.
The third attack took place on October 20, 1986, and police were called. Her account of what had been done to her was not acted on at the time, according to the opinion. At the 1994 trial she identified Jones, and the jury convicted him of attempting to murder her and of forcible rape, sodomy and oral copulation against her.
The prosecution's case on the JoAnn Sweets count rested on physical evidence. Using vacuum metal deposition, police developed Jones's fingerprints and a palm print on plastic bags recovered in the case. Carpet fibers recovered in the case matched the carpet in Jones's apartment, and so did fibers on a crocheted afghan recovered with them. Jones's sister told police she was almost 100 percent sure their mother had made that afghan, though she backtracked somewhat at trial.
DNA typing was the second strand. The prosecution's expert, Dr. Edward Blake, used the polymerase chain reaction method, testing first at the DQ-alpha gene and later with a polymarker test. Biological samples from the Sweets and Glover cases were consistent with Jones's genetic type. That type, the court noted, is shared by about 15 percent of African-Americans, so the result did not single him out; it meant he could not be excluded. Defense evidence in rebuttal reached the same point, that Jones could not be excluded as the donor.
The surviving women supplied the third strand. Each identified Jones as the man who had attacked her.
The defense attacked all three. Two DNA experts, Marc Taylor and Patrick O'Donnell, criticized the way certain test strips had been read. Jones's mother testified and could not say with confidence that the woman who had come to her door in August 1985 was the woman who later accused her son. The defense also challenged the survivors' credibility on cross-examination and pointed to other men as possible suspects. DNA testing excluded each man the defense named.
Nearly seven years passed between the first reported attack and the first charge in the combined case. A complaint charging Jones with the attempted murder of the woman attacked in August 1985 was filed on January 7, 1993. An information followed on January 14, 1993, and was amended twice in January 1994. The case number in San Diego County Superior Court was CR 136371.
By then the statute of limitations for the sex crimes in the 1985 attack had run out, around the middle of August 1991, so only the attempted murder could be charged. The defense moved to dismiss for prejudicial delay. It argued that witnesses had been lost and memories had faded, including those of Jones's mother and of the woman herself. The trial court denied the motion. On appeal the California Supreme Court agreed that the claimed prejudice was speculative, and because no prejudice had been shown, it did not need to weigh the prosecution's reasons for waiting.
Jury selection in this case began with written questionnaires. One prospective juror, identified in the opinion as A.M., wrote that he did not feel he could be party to killing another person regardless of the justification. The trial court excused him for cause on his written answers without questioning him in person. The Supreme Court later held that this was proper, because his answers showed he would not consider death as a possible punishment.
The prosecutor also used peremptory challenges, which a lawyer may exercise without stating a reason but not to exclude jurors because of race. The defense objected that the prosecutor was removing Black prospective jurors, under Batson v. Kentucky and the California case People v. Wheeler. The trial court found a prima facie case of discrimination as to two women, identified as Y.J. and C.G., and the 2021 opinion records that it later made the same finding as to a third Black prospective juror, J.Y. It found no prima facie case as to a fourth, N.S.
Once a prima facie case is found, the prosecutor must give a reason. Here the prosecutor relied on a numerical rating system. He and other members of the prosecution team had scored prospective jurors sight unseen, from their written questionnaires. Y.J., he said, was "13th lowest of the whole group," and "[t]here were too many people that are [rated] better than her." He also cited her Job Corps connection to Jones, her divorces, her interest in counseling and what he described as her weak support for the death penalty. For C.G. he cited what he called her liberal tendencies, her views on reasonable doubt and circumstantial evidence, and her own therapy. For J.Y. he pointed to a low score "based upon our numerical analysis by three people who independently read the questionnaire." The trial court accepted each explanation and denied each challenge. It said of the reasons for striking C.G. that they did "not relate to color whatsoever."
Before trial Jones asked the court to separate the murder counts from the attempted murder counts. The trial court refused. California law allows crimes of the same class to be tried together, and murder and attempted murder belong to the same class. The court also found that the crimes shared what it called a common method: women who were alone, choking or strangulation, sexual violence, and links to the two places where Jones stayed. The Supreme Court later found no abuse of discretion and pointed to the result itself. Because the jury convicted on two murder counts and could not agree on the other two, the court said, it plainly "did differentiate among defendant's crimes."
The prosecution also called Dr. John Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who served as chief of court services for San Diego County's forensic mental health division. The trial court limited him to general testimony about killings with a sexual motive and barred him from saying that Jones fit any profile. Its stated purpose was to give the jury insight into motive and intent. His testimony took up 16 pages of transcript. On cross-examination he agreed that his definition was not a legal one and did not appear in the DSM-III, the psychiatric diagnostic manual.
The trial court instructed the jury that the evidence of the October 1986 attack could not be used to show bad character or a disposition to commit crimes, and could be considered only for the limited purpose of deciding whether it showed intent, identity or motive.
The jury convicted Jones of the first degree murders of JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover, the attempted murders of the women attacked on August 15, 1985 and October 20, 1986, and forcible rape, sodomy and oral copulation against the woman attacked on October 20, 1986. It sustained an allegation that he used a deadly weapon in the August 1985 attempt, and it found all three special circumstances true.
On the murders of Tara Simpson and Trina Carpenter the jury deadlocked. Those counts were not retried.
At the penalty trial the same jury set the punishment at death on April 6, 1994, under California's 1978 death penalty law. Under state law the appeal to the California Supreme Court was automatic.
The California Supreme Court filed its opinion on August 26, 2013, in People v. Jones, 57 Cal.4th 899, and affirmed the judgment in all respects. On October 2, 2013, it modified the opinion without changing the judgment and denied rehearing.
The court rejected each of the main guilt-phase claims. Joinder of the counts was proper, it held, because cross-admissibility of evidence is not a requirement for joint trials and the jury had shown it could separate the charges. The testimony about the October 1986 attack was admissible to prove identity because the charged and uncharged crimes were sufficiently distinctive; in the court's words, "[t]o be highly distinctive, the charged and uncharged crimes need not be mirror images of each other." The limiting instruction stated the law correctly.
On the DNA evidence the court held that PCR testing at the DQ-alpha gene was generally accepted in the scientific community. A dispute over the way Dr. Blake had judged the intensity of dots on his test strips was harmless, because his later polymarker testing superseded it. Complaints about test strips that lacked a visible sensitivity dot went to the weight of the evidence, not its admissibility. The court added that any error on the polymarker results would not have mattered: the Carpenter count had ended without a verdict and had not been retried, and the case on the Sweets count was strong without the DNA, given the fingerprints, the afghan and the carpet fibers. The court also approved the use of population frequency figures for several ethnic groups, so long as the testimony did not assume the perpetrator shared the defendant's race.
On jury selection the court deferred to the trial judge's findings that the prosecutor's reasons for striking Y.J. and C.G. were genuine. For N.S., because the trial court had been unsure which prima facie standard applied, the Supreme Court reviewed the record for itself and found ample support for the ruling, including that her former husband had been convicted of murder. Dr. Meloy's testimony was upheld as relevant to motive. The court found that he had offered no opinion on Jones's own state of mind.
In 2014 Jones filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the California Supreme Court. He amended it substantially in 2018. The petition renewed his claim that the prosecution had used peremptory strikes to discriminate, relied on new evidence outside the trial record, and alleged that his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to raise and litigate the challenges properly. It also alleged that they had failed to object when the prosecutor used 13 of his 17 peremptory challenges to remove women.
To support the claim Jones asked, under Penal Code section 1054.9, for the prosecution's jury selection notes from 1994. The District Attorney refused, arguing that the notes were attorney work product and absolutely protected. San Diego County Superior Court Judge Joan P. Weber rejected that argument and ordered disclosure of notes that could possibly impeach what the prosecutor had said at the Batson and Wheeler hearings. The Court of Appeal first summarily denied the District Attorney's challenge. After the Supreme Court sent the matter back with directions to hear it, the Court of Appeal upheld the order in a published 2019 opinion, finding that the protection had been impliedly waived.
The California Supreme Court granted review and decided the case, People v. Superior Court (Jones), on December 2, 2021. Justice Kruger wrote the opinion, and Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Corrigan, Liu, Groban and Jenkins concurred.
The court did not decide whether jury selection notes are always protected work product. It assumed that they were and held that the protection had been waived. The trial prosecutor had chosen to explain his strikes by describing the rating system in detail, and the court said that a party cannot rely on protected material to support its position while keeping it from the other side. "A striking attorney cannot both stand on such a rating system and assert privilege over it," the court wrote. The District Attorney, it held, "may not now invoke attorney work product protection to withhold information necessary to the fair adjudication" of the claim.
The court explained why such notes matter. It quoted the United States Supreme Court's observation in Miller-El v. Dretke about "the practical difficulty of ferreting out discrimination in selections discretionary by nature," and its finding in that case that the prosecutors' own notes showed that race was on their minds. It cited Foster v. Chatman, where the prosecution's file plainly showed an effort to keep Black prospective jurors off the jury, and noted that notes can also support a prosecutor, as they did in an earlier California case. To guard against overbroad disclosure, the court said a trial judge can review the notes privately and redact core work product unrelated to jury selection.
The court affirmed the Court of Appeal and returned the case for further proceedings consistent with its opinion.
After the December 2021 ruling, the convictions and the death judgment stood, affirmed on direct appeal, while his habeas claims about jury selection were still pending and the discovery matter went back for further proceedings.
The deaths of Tara Simpson and Trina Carpenter remain legally unresolved. Jones was charged with both murders, the jury deadlocked, and the counts were not retried. He has not been convicted of either killing.
The 2013 opinion and the 2021 opinion differ slightly on jury selection. The 2013 opinion, reviewing the claims raised on direct appeal, describes prima facie findings for Y.J. and C.G. and none for N.S. The 2021 opinion adds that the trial court later found a prima facie case as to J.Y. as well.
The DNA evidence was contested throughout. The genetic type found in the Sweets and Glover samples is shared by about 15 percent of African-Americans, and the Supreme Court described the evidence on the Sweets count as strong without it, citing the fingerprints, the afghan and the carpet fibers.
August 15, 1985: A woman is attacked at Jones's San Diego apartment; he is taken into custody and released a few days later without charge.
August 29, 1985: Tara Simpson, 18, is found dead in San Diego.
February 11, 1986: Trina Carpenter, 22, is found dead in San Diego.
May 9, 1986: JoAnn Sweets, 34, is found dead in San Diego.
August 15, 1986: Sophia Glover, 37, is found dead in San Diego.
October 16, 1986: A second woman is attacked and survives.
October 20, 1986: A third woman is attacked and survives.
1987: Jones is convicted in a separate trial over the October 16 attack and sentenced to 22 years.
Mid-August 1991: The limitations period for the sex crimes in the August 1985 attack runs out.
January 7, 1993: Complaint filed charging attempted murder in the August 1985 attack.
January 14, 1993: Information filed; amended twice in January 1994.
1994: Jury convicts him of the murders of JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover and related counts; deadlocks on the Simpson and Carpenter counts, which are not retried.
April 6, 1994: Jury sets the penalty at death.
August 26, 2013: California Supreme Court affirms the judgment (People v. Jones, 57 Cal.4th 899).
October 2, 2013: Opinion modified; rehearing denied.
2014: Habeas petition filed in the California Supreme Court.
2018: Petition substantially amended.
2019: Court of Appeal upholds the order to disclose the prosecution's jury selection notes.
December 2, 2021: California Supreme Court affirms in People v. Superior Court (Jones) and returns the case for further proceedings.