A criminal jury has one job that cannot be done by majority. In most of the United States a verdict of guilty or not guilty has to be unanimous, and so does a sentence of death. When twelve people cannot get there, the judge declares a mistrial, the count is left hanging, and the prosecutor has to choose: try it again, accept what the jury did decide, or drop it. In a case with many victims, the choice repeats at every count. The cases below belong to men and one woman who were convicted of killing more than one person. In each, at least one jury reached its limit. What follows from that limit is the subject here: a retrial, a dismissal, a plea, a life sentence where the prosecutor had asked for death.
The case against Dorothea Puente began in November 1988, when the deaths of seven people came to light in Sacramento. She was arrested in Los Angeles four days later and charged with nine murders: the seven, a man who had died in 1985 and a woman who had died in her care in 1982. Her tenants had been elderly or ill, and the prosecution’s theory was that she kept their government benefit checks. She denied killing anyone.
Pretrial publicity in Sacramento was heavy enough that a judge, on February 19, 1992, granted a change of venue, and on July 9, 1992, the case was sent to Monterey County. The trial took place in Monterey County, and on August 26, 1993, the jury convicted Puente of the first degree murders of Dorothy Miller and Benjamin Fink, with the multiple-murder special circumstance, and of the second degree murder of Leona Carpenter. On the other six counts, those for Ruth Munroe, Everson Gillmouth, Betty Palmer, James Gallop, Vera Faye Martin and Alvaro Montoya, the jurors could not agree. A mistrial was declared on those counts and the prosecution later dismissed them. Puente was never convicted in any of the six deaths, and none of them can be attributed to her in a court’s voice.
The jury was not finished. Because special circumstances had been proved, jurors now had to choose between death and life without parole. After three days of deliberation they reached an impasse, and on October 13, 1993, Judge Virga declared a mistrial in the penalty phase. Afterward the jurors told reporters they had split 7 to 5, a majority of them for prison rather than execution. Prosecutors chose not to try the penalty a second time, which left a single outcome available. Puente, then 64, was sentenced on December 10, 1993, to two concurrent terms of life without the possibility of parole and a concurrent term of 15 years to life. Afterward, UPI reported, the judge invited the jurors into his chambers for lemonade and cookies.
The convictions survived. The California Court of Appeal affirmed them on August 28, 1997, a state habeas petition failed after a hearing on juror misconduct in 1998, and the federal district court denied relief on March 10, 2006. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case on February 19, 2008. Puente died of natural causes at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, at 82.
The arithmetic of her trial is worth setting down. Nine counts went to a jury. Three produced verdicts. Six produced nothing. And on the one question the jurors were asked to answer together as a community, whether she should die, they split along a line that no one could cross.
In Sacramento, seven women died between June 1986 and April 1987. Police focused on Morris Solomon Jr, a carpenter and handyman who already had a record of violence against women. He was arrested on April 22, 1987.
The guilt-phase jury in Sacramento County Superior Court convicted Solomon of six murders: the first degree murders of Yolanda Johnson, Maria Apodaca, Sheila Jacox and Sharon Massey, and the second degree murders of Cherie Washington and Linda Vitela. It also convicted him of sexual assaults on two women who survived, and it returned the multiple-murder special circumstance, which made him eligible for death. On the seventh death, that of Angela Polidore, the jury deadlocked. The court declared a mistrial and the charge was eventually dismissed. A count involving a third surviving woman ended the same way. Solomon was never convicted of either, and he denied every killing until his death.
The second deadlock came at sentencing. The first penalty jury could not agree, and Judge Virga declared a mistrial on the penalty. The prosecution chose to start the penalty phase over with new jurors. A second jury was chosen for a retrial before Judge Mering in 1992. The prosecution presented the circumstances of the six murders again and added evidence of Solomon’s earlier crimes against women in Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Sacramento. The defense countered with the story of a child left in rural Georgia with his grandmother for roughly the first thirteen years of his life. The second jury returned a death verdict. Solomon was taken from Sacramento County to state prison on September 23, 1992, and the Sacramento News and Review reported that he was the 342nd person sentenced to death in California.
Capital appeals in California go straight to the state Supreme Court. On July 15, 2010, it affirmed the judgment in a long opinion that dealt with the excusal of two prospective jurors at the penalty retrial, one of whom believed the state still used the electric chair, and with the limits the trial judge placed on questioning jurors. The second set of jurors heard the same six murders that had split the first.
Solomon died on August 1, 2024, at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, at 80, while still under sentence of death. He had been on death row for almost thirty-two years.
Steven Brian Pennell was an electrician from Glasgow, Delaware, a married father of two. In 1987 and 1988 women began dying in New Castle County, south of Wilmington. He was charged in the deaths of three of them: Shirley Ellis, Catherine DiMauro and Michelle Gordon.
The trial in Delaware Superior Court, before Judge Gebelein, lasted into the autumn of 1989. During closing argument the prosecutor, Kathy Jennings, told Pennell to his face that he had murdered Shirley Ellis, Cathy DiMauro and Michelle Gordon. The defense moved for a mistrial. The judge struck the remark and told the jury to disregard it. The State later conceded on appeal that it was improper. The Delaware Supreme Court held that no prejudice followed, writing that the case against Pennell was not close.
The jury was sequestered at a hotel, and its deliberations ran seven days, an unofficial record, according to the University of Delaware’s newspaper The Review. On a Thursday the jurors told the judge they had reached a verdict on one count and were deadlocked on the other two. Given a few minutes to consider whether more time would help, they came back unanimous on two of the three. WHYY reported that this was Thanksgiving Day 1989. Pennell was convicted of the first degree murders of Ellis and DiMauro. On the Gordon count the jury could not agree, and a mistrial was declared.
The penalty phase began the next day. The jurors could not agree on death, and Pennell received two life sentences. The Delaware Supreme Court later noted, in a passage that matters for anyone who thinks about juries, that a deadlocked jury could not be treated as a recommendation of life. The jurors had not chosen mercy. They had been unable to choose at all.
The unresolved count did not stay unresolved. In 1991 a grand jury indicted Pennell for the deaths of Michelle Gordon and Kathleen Meyer, a case that had never been tried. By then Pennell wanted to run his own defense, and after a psychiatric evaluation reported him competent, the court allowed it on October 11, 1991. On October 30, 1991, he pleaded no contest to both murders, and on October 31, the Superior Court judge imposed two death sentences. In affirming them on February 18, 1992, the Delaware Supreme Court acknowledged that the earlier jury had deadlocked on death for Ellis and DiMauro. It held that the evidence in the Gordon and Meyer cases supported death even without the earlier convictions.
Pennell was executed by lethal injection near Smyrna on March 14, 1992, the first execution in Delaware since 1946. A jury that could not agree had left him with two life sentences. A judge, sitting without one, gave him the opposite.
The hospital in Clinton, Indiana, had a four-bed intensive care unit, and in 1994 the number of deaths in it rose to about 100, against an average of 27 a year. A licensed practical nurse named Orville Lynn Majors had worked there. He was arrested on December 29, 1997, and charged with murder. Investigators believed he might be responsible for many more deaths than the prosecution ever put before a jury. Statistical studies, kept out of the trial, linked him to as many as 130 of 147 intensive care deaths between May 1993 and March 1995. He maintained his innocence.
The trial was held in Brazil, Indiana, in the fall of 1999. After more than three days of deliberation, on October 17, the Clay County jury returned guilty verdicts on six counts of murder. On a seventh it deadlocked, and the court declared a mistrial on that count. The verdict came, the Greene County Daily World noted ten years later, on his mother’s 61st birthday. On November 15, 1999, Judge Ernest Yelton sentenced him to six consecutive 60-year terms, 360 years. A decade later the same newspaper reported that his earliest possible release date was July 1, 2177.
Even the arithmetic is disputed. The Associated Press, reporting the sentencing, listed the judge’s six: Mary Ann Alderson, Dorothea Hixon, Luella Hopkins, Freddie Dale Wilson, Derek Maxwell and Cecil Smith. A 2009 Daily World article gave a different list, including Ethel Rozsa and Margaret Hornick. A 2017 WTHR report said the jury deadlocked on the death of Cecil Smith. The Indiana Supreme Court’s opinion, which affirmed the convictions on August 14, 2002, names none of the patients. Which death was the subject of the deadlocked count has never been made clear.
Majors died at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City on September 24, 2017, at 56. He had denied harming anyone from the beginning. The seventh count was never retried, and it stands in the file as a question that twelve people declined to answer.
Brandon Tholmer, a former shipping clerk who had been released in 1979 from a state hospital, was arrested in Los Angeles in November 1983 during an investigation of the deaths of elderly women in Hollywood and nearby districts. Police at one point suspected him in as many as 34 deaths and later cleared him in 22. They said they believed he had committed seven more, but the prosecutor said the evidence for charges was lacking.
The prosecution went to trial on a narrower set of counts. After a trial that ran about six months in Los Angeles Superior Court, a jury convicted Tholmer in the summer of 1986 of four counts of first degree murder with special circumstances: Rose Lederman, 80, in August 1981; Woolloomooloo Woodcock, 66, in August 1982; Mary Pauquette, 72, in September 1982; and Dorothy Fain, 72, in August 1983. The jurors could not agree on two other counts, the murder of Loraine Wells in May 1983 and an attempted burglary in November 1983 involving an 85-year-old woman. Judge Clarence Stromwall declared a mistrial on those two. UPI gave Wells’s age as 82 in its coverage of the verdict and sentencing and as 76 in its report of the preliminary hearing.
Having convicted him, the jury then declined to send him to the gas chamber. In November 1986 Judge Stromwall sentenced Tholmer to four consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Lucille Pyle, 82, whose death was one of the first two charges announced at his arrest, was not among the five counts bound over for trial. He was never convicted in the death of Loraine Wells or of Lucille Pyle.
In San Diego County, a jury heard a case in 1994 that charged Bryan Jones with the murders of four women: JoAnn Sweets, 34, Sophia Glover, 37, Tara Simpson, 18, and Trina Carpenter, 22. The deaths dated from 1986. Jones was also charged with the attempted murder of two women who survived. He had been convicted in 1987 of several felonies involving a third woman who survived.
Before trial Jones asked the court to separate the murder counts from the attempted murder counts. The court refused, ruling that the crimes shared a common method. The California Supreme Court later saw no abuse of discretion. It pointed, in part, to the outcome. A jury that convicts on two murder counts and cannot agree on two others has shown that it examined each charge on its own.
The verdicts were these. On the murders of JoAnn Sweets and Sophia Glover, with the multiple-murder special circumstance, the jury convicted. On the murders of Tara Simpson and Trina Carpenter it deadlocked. Those counts were not retried. The court’s word was "not retried," not dismissed, a legal distinction that leaves open whether the State ever gave them up. The jury set the penalty at death on April 6, 1994, and the Supreme Court affirmed on August 26, 2013. On December 2, 2021, it issued a ruling on discovery in a habeas petition, filed in 2014 and amended in 2018, that raised claims about jury selection. That proceeding was still pending at the end of 2021. The deaths of Simpson and Carpenter are legally unresolved. He has not been convicted of either.
Sean Vincent Gillis was arrested in Baton Rouge in April 2004. In the days that followed he confessed to killing eight women in the Baton Rouge area between 1994 and 2004. A DNA swab he had given voluntarily matched evidence from three of them. Two of the cases went to court.
The first came to court on August 20, 2007, in West Baton Rouge Parish, where Gillis entered a Crosby plea, a Louisiana procedure under which a defendant pleads guilty while reserving the right to appeal certain pretrial rulings. He pleaded guilty to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams and was sentenced to life at hard labor without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence. The State had itself appealed the acceptance of the plea. The First Circuit Court of Appeal rejected that challenge on March 26, 2008.
The second case was tried by a jury in East Baton Rouge Parish in July 2008. The victim was Donna Bennett Johnston, 43. Her son told jurors that he had tried not to look at Gillis in the courtroom because he was there "for my mother." The jury convicted Gillis of first degree murder. A week later, just before 6 p.m. on a Thursday, the jurors told the judge they were "hopelessly deadlocked" on whether he should be put to death. Unable to agree unanimously on a death sentence, they left the court with a life sentence by default. WAFB reported that this meant he would spend the rest of his life in isolation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Marion Albert Pruett was released from a federal bank robbery sentence in 1979 and placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program in New Mexico under an assumed identity. Within two years five people were dead. He was convicted in four states: New Mexico (Pamela Sue Carnuteson, his wife, first degree murder, life), Mississippi (Peggy Lowe), Arkansas (Bobbie Jean Robertson, capital murder, jury verdict September 9, 1982, death) and Colorado (James R. Balderson and Anthony Taitt, guilty pleas, consecutive life terms). He had also pleaded guilty in federal court to robbery and kidnapping.
The Mississippi case is where a jury failed to agree. The first jury sentenced Pruett to death for the murder of Peggy Lowe. A federal district court then granted him a new trial because a biased juror had served. He was retried in February 1988 and convicted again, but the jury could not agree on a penalty, and the court imposed a life sentence.
In June 1987 Governor Bill Clinton had demanded that Pruett be returned to Arkansas to face execution. After the Mississippi retrial, in March 1988, Arkansas took him, and an execution was set for April 7, 1988. He filed a federal petition on April 4, and a district court stayed the execution that day. In 1997 the district court granted the petition, finding that pretrial publicity and the use of hypnotically refreshed testimony had denied him a fair trial. The Eighth Circuit reversed on August 7, 1998. Pruett was executed in Arkansas in April 1999, at 49, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Mississippi’s life sentence outlasted the death sentence the first jury had given.
Gerald Eugene Stano was convicted of first degree murder in the deaths of ten women and girls in Florida between 1973 and 1980. Most of those convictions came on his own guilty pleas, in Volusia and Bradford counties, and one came from a judge sitting without a jury in Seminole County. In one case a jury had to decide, and the first one could not.
The case was that of Cathy Lee Scharf, 17, of Port Orange, who died in December 1973. Stano was tried in Brevard County from September 26 to 30, 1983, and the jury could not agree on a verdict. A retrial ran from November 28 to December 2, 1983. The girl’s parents had said they would not testify a second time, and the court declared them unavailable and read their earlier testimony to the jury. The State added a witness, Clarence Zacke, a prison inmate who testified that Stano had told him he had killed her. The defense brought out that Zacke was serving long sentences and had traded his testimony for a reduction. The second jury convicted Stano and recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2. A death sentence followed.
Between the two trials the case had changed: the parents' live testimony was replaced by transcript, and an inmate witness was added. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1985.
Stano was executed in Florida’s electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke on March 23, 1998, for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf, at 7:15 a.m. By 1987, the Evening Herald had reported, he held three death sentences and seven life sentences. The Scharf execution was the one carried out.
William "Billy" Mansfield Jr was tried first in California, in the 1980 killing of Rene Saling, 29, a mother of three from Watsonville. That first trial, in Santa Cruz County, ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree. Because of heavy publicity the retrial was moved to Marin County. Under California law at the time he could have faced the death penalty if convicted, UPI reported.
In October 1981, on the eve of the retrial, Mansfield and another inmate escaped from the Santa Cruz County jail. Mansfield was caught the next day, 11 hours later, and offered no resistance. The retrial went ahead in early 1982. The jury was deliberating in February 1982. The jury convicted him of murdering Rene Saling, and he received a life sentence. The degree of the conviction and the length of the term have not been reported. The Associated Press later summarized the outcome as a conviction "after a mistrial and an attempted prison escape."
Florida was next. The deaths of four women and girls came to light in Hernando County in March and April 1981. In 1982 Mansfield pleaded guilty to their murders: Elaine Zeigler, 15, Sandra Jean Graham, 21, Theresa Caroline Fillingim, 16, and a fourth woman, in her twenties, and to the attempted sexual battery of another woman. He received four concurrent life sentences. The fifth conviction, Saling’s, had needed two juries. The four Florida convictions needed none, because he pleaded.
In September 2022 Mansfield confessed to the 1980 killing of Carol Ann Barrett, 18. Prosecutors declined to file charges, and she is not part of his record of convictions. He was reported to be in prison in June 2026.
Set the cases side by side and the deadlock is not one event. For Puente it left six counts dismissed and a sentence of life without parole imposed because the prosecutors chose not to try the penalty again. For Solomon it produced a second penalty jury and, with it, a sentence of death. For Pennell the same disagreement produced two life sentences, followed by a no-contest plea and a death sentence from a judge. For Stano and Mansfield it meant a retrial, and the retrial changed the evidence. For Majors and Jones, it meant counts that no one tried again. For Gillis, it meant that a jury that had agreed on guilt could not, a week later, agree on death. For Pruett, it meant a life sentence on a retrial that did not matter in the end.
None of these juries was ever asked to say why it split, and they rarely do. Puente’s jurors went on the record about the numbers. Most others did not. What the law recorded was narrower: a mistrial, a dismissal, a count that stayed charged and unproved. Angela Polidore, Loraine Wells, Tara Simpson, Trina Carpenter and the six people named in Puente’s dismissed counts belong to cases in which a court said it could not say.
• 1980: Rene Saling dies in California; Mansfield’s first trial later ends in a mistrial.
• 1981: Mansfield’s Santa Cruz County retrial is moved to Marin County; October 1981, he escapes the county jail and is recaptured within a day.
• 1982: Mansfield convicted of murder at the retrial; pleads guilty to four murders in Florida. Pruett convicted in Arkansas (September 9, 1982).
• 1983: Stano’s first Scharf trial ends in a mistrial (September); retrial convicts him (December).
• 1986: Tholmer jury convicts on four counts, deadlocks on two; sentenced to four terms of life without parole in November.
• February 1988: Pruett’s Mississippi retrial; penalty jury deadlocks; life.
• November 1988: Puente charged with nine murders after arrest in Los Angeles.
• November 1989: Pennell convicted on two counts after seven days; mistrial on the third; penalty jury deadlocks and he receives two life sentences.
• October 31, 1991: Pennell sentenced to death by a judge on the Gordon and Meyer counts after pleading no contest.
• March 14, 1992: Pennell executed.
• 1992: Solomon’s second penalty jury returns a death verdict.
• August 26, 1993: Puente convicted of three murders; jury deadlocks on six counts.
• October 13, 1993: Puente penalty-phase mistrial; sentenced December 10 to life without parole.
• April 6, 1994: Jones jury sets death; deadlocked on two murder counts, not retried.
• March 23, 1998: Stano executed.
• October 17, 1999: Majors convicted of six murders; deadlock on a seventh.
• August 20, 2007: Gillis pleads guilty to second degree murder.
• July 2008: Gillis convicted of first degree murder; jury deadlocks on death a week later; life.
• July 15, 2010: California Supreme Court affirms Solomon’s death sentence.
• March 27, 2011: Puente dies in prison.
• September 24, 2017: Majors dies in prison.
• August 1, 2024: Solomon dies in custody.