David Westerfield was a self-employed design engineer in the Sabre Springs district of San Diego, a man whose work on medical rehabilitation devices had earned the respect of the companies that hired him. In February 2002 he became the only suspect in the death of Danielle van Dam, a child who lived two doors away. He was arrested on February 22, tried that summer before a jury that was never sequestered despite months of saturation coverage, and convicted on August 21, 2002, of first degree murder, with other charges. The jury found true a special circumstance that made the case eligible for the death penalty, and on September 16, 2002, after first reporting that it was deadlocked, it returned a unanimous verdict of death.
The trial judge imposed that sentence on January 3, 2003. Sixteen years later, on February 4, 2019, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in its entirety. Westerfield has never admitted the crime. He pleaded not guilty, did not testify at his trial and declined to speak at his sentencing. In November 2026 his name appeared on the Governor's list of intended clemency recipients, part of a plan to convert every death sentence in California to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Westerfield was 49 when he was arrested and 50 by the time his case reached a jury. He had grown up working, putting himself through college, and his career was built on design engineering. At the penalty phase of his trial, former co-workers and supervisors described the part he had played in creating and developing medical devices at several companies. One former supervisor told the jury that he had led design teams responsible for devices used in joint rehabilitation and for optical lenses, and described a security device he had designed. The owner of one company that employed him testified that he had designed a shoulder rehabilitation device that had helped more than 600,000 people.
By 2002 he was living in Sabre Springs, a suburban district of San Diego.
At the penalty phase two of her teachers spoke about her. They described a girl who loved writing and math, who belonged to the Daisies, the program for the youngest Girl Scouts, and who danced and played the piano. One teacher told the jury that she got along with everyone and wanted to make sure that no one else had their feelings hurt.
Her death was confirmed on February 27, 2002.
The San Diego Police Department opened its inquiry on Saturday, February 2, 2002. Officers spoke with the neighbors that day and again on February 3, and they reached most of the families nearby at once. Westerfield was not among them: he had been away from the city over the weekend, and he came back to the neighborhood on Monday morning, February 4.
Detectives interviewed him that afternoon. A San Diego police officer questioned him at length and gave him a lie-detector examination, and investigators would later describe him as having made inconsistent statements about where he had been over the weekend. The trial court later ruled that statements he gave to detectives on the evening of February 4, before he signed a form consenting to a search and before the first warrant was executed, had been taken in circumstances in which no reasonable person would have felt free to leave, and without the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona. Those statements were suppressed. At sentencing, his defense argued that the whole interrogation, which they put at 16 hours, had been unlawful and that it justified a lesser sentence. The trial judge found that it had caused him no prejudice at all.
Police obtained five search warrants in nine days. A detective secured the first by telephone from a superior court judge early on February 5, after testifying under oath in a conference call with a deputy district attorney, and a second followed later that same day. A third followed on February 6, a fourth on February 7 and the fifth, the broadest of them, on February 13. A judge issued each one. From February 4 until his arrest, Westerfield was under constant police surveillance.
Investigators linked him to the case through physical evidence recovered under those warrants. On Friday, February 22, 2002, San Diego police arrested him. The police department declined at first to give details of the arrest. He was booked into the county jail and held without bail.
The San Diego County District Attorney's office charged him in a complaint with murder, with other charges: a felony count under Penal Code sections 207 and 208, subdivision (b), and a misdemeanor count under former section 311.11, subdivision (a). The murder count carried a special-circumstance allegation under section 190.2, subdivision (a)(17), which, if found true, would make him eligible for death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The complaint gave no specific dates for the alleged crimes.
At his arraignment on Tuesday, February 26, 2002, his attorney entered pleas of not guilty to every count and denied every special allegation. Westerfield himself told the court, "Not guilty." The district attorney had not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty. The defense asked for a gag order, and the judge refused it. His lead counsel told reporters that the case should be tried in a courtroom and not in the press, and that people should stop guessing about the facts.
The prosecution would try the murder count solely on a theory of first degree felony murder. The trial court later refused a request to instruct the jury on premeditated and deliberate murder, finding no substantial evidence to support that theory. The defense moved before trial to sever the misdemeanor count and to have it tried separately. The court refused, and the three counts went to a single jury.
The defense also challenged every search warrant. It argued that the first had been issued on the strength of his failure to pass the lie-detector examination, evidence that California law keeps out of a courtroom, and that without it there was no probable cause. Because the four later warrants rested on what the first search produced, the defense argued that everything should be suppressed. The trial court denied the motion. It ruled that the magistrate had properly considered the examination results, that probable cause existed even if they were set aside, and that the first search would have been valid in any event, both because police had relied in good faith on the warrant and because Westerfield had consented.
The case drew an extraordinary volume of coverage. Before trial, the defense chose not to seek a change of venue and instead asked the court to sequester the jury for the entire trial, arguing that only isolation from outside influence could guarantee an impartial panel. The court had already sealed pretrial motions and imposed a gag order. It deferred a ruling on sequestration.
Jury selection began with a complaint from the defense that most of those summoned had not appeared and that the panel would not be a fair cross-section of the community. The court denied the defense's request for relief. The defense used all 20 of its peremptory challenges and then asked for more, pointing in particular to a prospective juror it had tried and failed to remove for cause. The court refused. The jury was sworn, and on the following day the defense told the court it was dissatisfied with five of the seated jurors. The court found the request untimely and said it would have denied it anyway.
In its first charge to the jury, the trial court warned that a great deal of misinformation about the case was circulating in the media and reminded the jurors that they had been chosen because they had agreed to decide the case only on the evidence. The defense renewed its request for sequestration several times as the trial went on. Each time the court declined, explaining that it expected the jurors to obey its orders to avoid all news coverage. In July, when another case was dominating the news, the judge told the jurors that it bore no relation to theirs and that they were to consider only the evidence before them.
Opening statements began on Tuesday, June 4, 2002. The prosecution's case rested on the evidence collected under the warrants and on Westerfield's own account of the weekend of February 1 to 4. The defense case was principally an alibi. Defense experts testified about the timing of the death and placed it after February 5, when Westerfield was already under constant police surveillance and could not, the defense argued, have been responsible. Prosecution experts disputed those estimates. Westerfield did not testify.
The defense also tried to suggest that other people could have been responsible, a theory the jury rejected. The prosecution, for its part, called a former girlfriend of Westerfield's as a witness, and the scope of her cross-examination became one of the issues the defense later carried to the state Supreme Court.
The jury received the case in August and deliberated for nine days. On August 21, 2002, it announced its verdicts in open court. It found Westerfield guilty of first degree murder, found the special circumstance true, and convicted him on both of the other counts.
The jurors were told to return on August 28 for the penalty phase. They were released for the week with the standard warning not to discuss the case with anyone and to report any attempt to contact them. The defense asked again for sequestration and was refused again.
The prosecution relied on the evidence from the guilt phase and added two further strands. It presented evidence of an earlier uncharged incident from 1994, which Westerfield had himself described to a police officer during his interview in February 2002, and it called the girl's parents and two of her teachers as victim impact witnesses. The defense presented his engineering career and the testimony of people who knew him. The prosecution asked the jury to impose the ultimate penalty; the defense urged it to spare his life.
On Monday, September 16, 2002, in its fifth day of penalty deliberations, the jury sent a note saying it was deadlocked. After lunch and roughly ten more minutes of discussion, it announced a unanimous verdict of death. His lead attorney said afterward that he was disappointed, criticized the death penalty and said the defense would not argue the case in the media.
Sentencing was first set for November 22, 2002. It took place on Friday, January 3, 2003, in San Diego County Superior Court. Under California law, the jury's verdict was not the last word: the trial judge had to rule on an automatic application to reduce the penalty to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The defense asked for exactly that. It urged the judge not to yield to public feeling in San Diego and argued that police misconduct during the interrogation weighed in favor of a lesser sentence.
The judge denied the application and sentenced Westerfield to death on the murder count. On the felony count the court imposed a term of 11 years, stayed under Penal Code section 654, and on the misdemeanor count it imposed time served. Westerfield declined to make a statement and showed no emotion. He became the 617th person on California's death row.
Every California death judgment goes directly to the state Supreme Court. Westerfield's case, S112691, took sixteen years to decide. When it came, on February 4, 2019, the opinion ran to about 150 pages. The Chief Justice wrote for a unanimous court; five associate justices joined her, along with a justice of the Court of Appeal assigned to sit in the case.
The court rejected the challenge to the warrants. It held that probable cause supported the first warrant even without the lie-detector results, so it did not need to decide whether those results could properly be part of a probable cause showing. Because the first search was valid, the later warrants and searches were valid too. The court found it unnecessary to decide whether good-faith reliance on the warrant or Westerfield's consent provided an alternative basis.
On jury selection, the court held that the trial judge had not erred in denying the challenge for cause to the prospective juror the defense had removed with a peremptory challenge, and that in any event Westerfield had not shown he was tried by a biased juror. It held that he had forfeited his claim to additional peremptory challenges by failing to rely on pretrial publicity when he asked for them, and added that it would have rejected the claim on the merits because he had not shown he was likely to receive an unfair trial because of bias from that publicity. Its review of the record, the court wrote, persuaded it that the proceedings had been conducted with solemnity and sobriety.
The court then took up sequestration, which the defense had argued was so plainly required that the trial court's refusal violated due process, and that the court had improperly left the decision to the jurors themselves. The Supreme Court disagreed and found no error, at either phase. On the penalty phase in particular, it said there was "nothing in the record to indicate that the jury did not continue to abide" by the trial court's admonitions to avoid news coverage, and that it could not assume on a silent record that jurors had ignored those orders.
The court held that the misdemeanor count had been properly joined with the murder and felony counts, that the claim about severance had not been preserved, and that it would have found no error in any event. It rejected claims about the cross-examination of the former girlfriend, the limits placed on the defense's re-examination of the officer who had interviewed Westerfield, the exclusion of hearsay evidence the defense offered in support of its timing defense, and the instructions on motive and on a category of investigative evidence. It held that the evidence was sufficient to support the felony count on which the felony-murder theory rested, that the trial court had no duty to instruct on second degree murder or involuntary manslaughter as lesser included offenses, and that it had properly refused to instruct on premeditated murder.
On the penalty phase, the court upheld the admission of the 1994 incident and the instructions on it, the use of the misdemeanor-count evidence as aggravation, and the victim impact testimony from the parents and teachers. Where it assumed an error for the sake of argument, it found the error harmless, and it held that the possible errors taken together did not warrant reversal. It rejected the standard challenges to California's death penalty law, including the argument, supported by a statistical study, that the statute fails to narrow the class of murders eligible for death. Its disposition was four words: "We affirm the judgment."
Westerfield is alive and held in a California state prison. The death sentence affirmed in 2019 has not been carried out. The state has not executed anyone since January 17, 2006, and the Governor placed a moratorium on executions in 2019, withdrew the state's execution protocol and closed San Quentin's execution chamber.
On November 5, 2026, the Governor announced that he would use his constitutional clemency authority to change every death sentence in California, 548 in all, to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The Governor's office published a List of Intended Clemency Recipients. Westerfield's name appears on it with his San Diego County trial case number and a date of death judgment of January 6, 2003, and without the mark the list uses for a person with more than one felony conviction. He is not on the separate list of intended recipients twice convicted of a felony, the 382 cases that under article V, section 8 of the California Constitution need the state Supreme Court's recommendation before the Governor may act.
The Governor's office stated that the commutations "will not go into effect until the necessary legal steps are completed." Its fact sheet said the action would release no one, would not make anyone eligible for parole, would not change any conviction or restitution order and would exclude every recipient from the parole board's new commutation and resentencing regulations. Prosecutors announced challenges in the state Supreme Court. As of November 13, 2026, Westerfield remained under sentence of death.
Three features of California law shaped the course of this case. The first is the special circumstance. Under the state's death penalty statute, first degree murder is punishable by death or life without parole only if the jury finds true one of the special circumstances listed in Penal Code section 190.2. In Westerfield's case the prosecution relied on subdivision (a)(17), which covers a murder committed during one of a list of other felonies, and tried the case only as felony murder. That choice is why the appeal turned in part on whether the evidence supported the underlying felony count, and why the court addressed whether the jury should have been offered second degree murder or manslaughter as alternatives.
The second is the judge's independent review. Under section 190.4, subdivision (e), every death verdict brings an automatic application to modify the penalty, and the trial judge must weigh the evidence and decide whether the verdict is contrary to law or the evidence. That is why the jury's September 2002 verdict was followed by a separate sentencing hearing in January 2003, at which the defense argued for life without parole and the judge declined to reduce the sentence.
The third is the automatic appeal. Section 1239, subdivision (b), sends every death judgment straight to the California Supreme Court, bypassing the intermediate Court of Appeal. The court reviews the whole record, guilt and penalty alike, which is why the 2019 opinion addressed more than two dozen claims, from the first search warrant to the constitutionality of the statute itself.
The 2026 clemency plan added a fourth. Article V, section 8, of the state constitution gives the Governor the power to commute sentences but bars clemency for anyone twice convicted of a felony unless the state Supreme Court recommends it. The Governor's office reviewed state and federal criminal histories to sort the 548 condemned prisoners into those two groups. Westerfield was placed in the group the Governor may act on without the court's recommendation.
Westerfield has maintained his innocence since his arraignment. His defense at trial was that the death occurred after he was under police surveillance, and his experts testified to that effect; prosecution experts disputed the estimates, and the jury rejected the defense. The California Supreme Court did not revisit the jury's assessment of that evidence beyond holding the conviction sound.
The 1994 incident presented at the penalty phase was never charged. It came before the jury only as aggravating evidence, and the defense contested its use; the state Supreme Court held that it was properly admitted.
Whether any of the 2026 commutations will take effect, and when, was unresolved as of November 13, 2026, with prosecutors preparing challenges in the state Supreme Court.
February 2, 2002: The San Diego Police Department opens its inquiry in Sabre Springs, San Diego.
February 4, 2002: Westerfield returns to the neighborhood and is interviewed by detectives; he is under constant police surveillance from this day.
February 5 to 13, 2002: Police obtain five search warrants.
February 22, 2002: Westerfield is arrested and held without bail.
February 26, 2002: Arraignment; not guilty pleas to murder, with other charges, and denial of the special allegation; a request for a gag order is refused.
February 27, 2002: The victim's death is confirmed.
June 4, 2002: Opening statements in San Diego County Superior Court.
August 21, 2002: Guilty verdicts on all three counts after nine days of deliberation; special circumstance found true.
August 28, 2002: Penalty phase begins.
September 16, 2002: Unanimous jury verdict of death.
January 3, 2003: The trial judge denies the application to modify the penalty and sentences Westerfield to death.
February 4, 2019: The California Supreme Court affirms the judgment in its entirety (People v. Westerfield, S112691).
November 5, 2026: Westerfield is named on the Governor's List of Intended Clemency Recipients for commutation to life without parole; the commutations are not yet in effect.