Larry Layton is the one person a court in the United States ever convicted over the events of November 18, 1978, in the far northwest of Guyana. That afternoon, at Port Kaituma, members of the Peoples Temple turned on a congressional party that was leaving with a group of defectors. Congressman Leo J. Ryan of California and four other people died, and ten more were wounded, among them the deputy chief of the United States mission in Georgetown. Layton, a long-serving member of the Temple who had joined the departing group as a supposed defector, wounded two of the people he was traveling with.
His legal history ran for more than eight years and through two countries. Guyana charged him first with murder, then tried him only for attempted murder, and a jury in Georgetown acquitted him on every count in May 1980. Expelled to the United States, he faced a four-count federal indictment in San Francisco. His first trial ended in 1981 with a jury hopelessly deadlocked. After two rounds in the Ninth Circuit over what evidence a second jury could hear, a federal jury convicted him on December 1, 1986, of conspiracy to murder a member of Congress, aiding and abetting the murder of a member of Congress, conspiracy to murder an internationally protected person and aiding and abetting the attempted murder of an internationally protected person. He received a life sentence, was paroled in April 2002 and was discharged from federal parole supervision in March 2011.
Laurence John Layton Jr., called Larry, was raised in the Quaker faith and was living in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s. He was drawn into the Peoples Temple in its early years in Mendocino County, in far northern California. By 1978 he was a trusted resident of Jonestown, the Temple's settlement in the Guyanese interior, close to the group's leadership, and had served on the Temple's security force in the United States.
The congressman reached Jonestown on November 17, 1978, with a delegation that included relatives of Temple members and journalists. The next day a number of residents asked to leave with him, and the party set out for Port Kaituma to fly back to Georgetown. Layton announced that he too wished to leave and went with the group. Several of the defectors did not trust him and believed he was only pretending.
At Port Kaituma, Temple members who had followed the party killed the congressman and four others and wounded ten more, the deputy chief of mission and a member of the congressman's staff among them. Layton wounded two of the departing members. He survived the deaths at Jonestown that followed the same day.
The United States Embassy in Georgetown told Washington on November 19 that Guyanese police had arrested Layton in connection with the events at Port Kaituma. Three days later, on November 22, 1978, he was charged in Georgetown Magistrates Court with the murders of the congressman and the four others who died, and with acts done with intent to murder three of the departing members. He was remanded in custody to January 15, 1979. That same day he signed a written confession, which began with the words "I, Larry Layton, take full responsibility for all the deaths and injuries." He had first denied harming anyone.
The Guyanese case changed shape over the following year. A preliminary hearing on the murder charge was set aside on a challenge by his Guyanese counsel, and a second hearing reduced the charges. In early March 1979 the FBI office in San Francisco passed on word that the Guyanese charges had been dismissed, and asked the legal attaché in Georgetown to establish what Guyana intended to do. By February 1980 the answer was clear: the Director of Public Prosecutions had drafted and signed an indictment for attempted murder only, covering the two people Layton had wounded and others traveling with them, and Guyana did not plan to charge him over the congressman's death.
The trial began in May 1980. Layton pleaded not guilty. On May 23, 1980, the ambassador cabled that the jury had deliberated for two and a half hours and returned "a verdict of not guilty on all four counts of the indictment," by ten votes to two on each count. The prosecutor told the embassy that Layton would stay in custody while the Director of Public Prosecutions decided whether to bring murder or conspiracy charges. In September 1980 Guyana told the embassy it would take no further action. In all he spent about a year and a half in custody in Georgetown.
The United States had moved against him even while he was in Guyanese custody. On March 14, 1979, a federal grand jury in San Francisco returned a sealed indictment under 18 U.S.C. 351, charging assassination and conspiracy to assassinate the congressman at Port Kaituma. A federal complaint followed on June 4, 1980.
The case that went to trial rested on a later indictment. On October 9, 1980, a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California returned four counts: conspiracy to murder a member of Congress, under section 351(d); aiding and abetting the murder of a member of Congress, under sections 351(a) and 2; conspiracy to murder an internationally protected person, under section 1117; and aiding and abetting the attempted murder of an internationally protected person, under sections 1116(a) and 2. The protected person in the last two counts was the embassy's deputy chief of mission, wounded at Port Kaituma. The indictment was unsealed on October 10.
Guyana let him go that autumn. On October 7, 1980, Layton agreed to leave for New York rather than be rearrested, with a notice of discontinuance to go before the Guyanese court. His departure was held up over the payment of his lawyers, and he left in the custody of three US marshals in late November. On November 22 he appeared before a United States magistrate, and on November 24, 1980, before the chief judge of the Northern District of California, he pleaded not guilty to all counts and was held in the marshal's custody.
The defense argued that he could not be tried in the United States for acts in another country; the Supreme Court declined to take up that challenge in June 1981. Trial dates slipped from July to August 1981. Jury selection began on August 1, and the trial began in San Francisco on August 14, 1981.
The government built its case on the confession, which the chief judge admitted over defense objection, and on the testimony of survivors. The judge kept out a tape recording made at Jonestown on the evening of November 18. The defense called no witnesses. On Saturday, September 26, 1981, the jurors said they were deadlocked, asked for testimony to be read back, and later reported that they were "hopelessly deadlocked on all four counts." The government asked for an instruction urging them to try again; the judge refused, declared a mistrial and discharged the jury.
The judge denied a defense motion for acquittal and, in 1981, released Layton on bond pending a retrial. He would remain at liberty for most of the next five years.
The second trial waited on the Ninth Circuit. Before it, the government asked the district court for an advance ruling that it could put before the new jury statements by the Temple's leader that the first jury had not heard. On January 11, 1982, the court refused. It found enough evidence for a prima facie case that a conspiracy to kill the congressman existed, but held that the leader's statements had not been made "in furtherance of" that conspiracy. The government appealed.
In August 1983 the Ninth Circuit reversed in part. It held, in the government's later summary, that statements made before the congressman's arrival furthered the conspiracy because they were meant to bring listeners into line with the coming attempt on the congressman's life, and it sent the case back for the district court to weigh the evidence under the rules on unfair prejudice. The appeals court denied rehearing on December 6, 1983, and a stay of its mandate on December 23. Layton asked the Supreme Court to stay the mandate while he sought review; the Solicitor General opposed the application in January 1984.
On remand the district court admitted the earlier statements but, on April 18, 1984, again excluded the recording made on the evening of November 18, finding its value slight and its capacity for unfair prejudice great. It refused to reconsider on August 28, and the government appealed a second time. On July 29, 1985, the Ninth Circuit upheld the exclusion. The government chose to retry Layton without the tape.
The chief judge set a retrial date of January 2, 1986, and then moved it three times: to April 15, to June 24 and finally to September 18, 1986. On that day the retrial began in San Francisco on the same four counts, with the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California prosecuting in person. The government expected two months: two weeks to pick a jury, a month for its case and about as long for the defense. Where the first prosecution had concentrated on the minutes at Port Kaituma, the second presented a broader conspiracy reaching back into Jonestown.
On December 1, 1986, the jury convicted Layton on all four counts. The chief judge remanded him to the custody of the US Marshals Service and set sentencing for January 23, 1987. The four counts together carried a maximum of two life terms and two terms of twenty years. Afterward a number of jurors wrote to the judge asking for leniency.
Layton was sentenced to life imprisonment. The term carried no fixed release date: when he would go free was for the United States Parole Commission to decide, and the sentencing judge recommended that he be paroled after five years.
He appealed. A petition for rehearing was before the Ninth Circuit in September 1988, and on February 21, 1989, the Supreme Court denied his petition for review. With that, the conviction was final.
The Parole Commission did not follow the sentencing judge's recommendation. At hearings in 1991 it ruled that he would serve twenty years and set his release for 2006. The date was later brought forward to April 2004, with credit for the time he had spent in custody in Georgetown. The judge who had tried both cases wrote to the parole authorities asking for his release and died before that effort succeeded.
In 1996 his supporters began a campaign for a presidential commutation. A petition went to the Pardon Attorney in 1997 with eighty-seven letters of support. When President Clinton issued his final pardons and commutations on January 20, 2001, Layton's name was not among them.
A further parole hearing took place at a federal prison in California about a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. About a hundred letters of support were gathered for it. The examiner recommended release, and Layton left federal custody in April 2002, two years ahead of his scheduled date. In all he had spent about eighteen years in custody in Guyana and the United States. In March 2011 the Parole Commission ended its supervision of him and closed his case. He has since lived in California.
The statute at the center of the prosecution, 18 U.S.C. 351, makes it a federal crime to kill a member of Congress or to conspire to do so; FBI files on the case called it the congressional assassination statute, and the first sealed indictment of March 1979 cited it in exactly those terms. Sections 1116 and 1117 cover the murder and attempted murder of an internationally protected person and conspiracy to commit those crimes, and the indictment used them for the wounding of the deputy chief of mission. His defense argued that these laws could not reach acts committed in Guyana and took the point to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it in 1981.
His life sentence fell under federal parole. The United States Parole Commission decided when Layton would be freed, set and reset the date, and supervised him after release until it closed his case in 2011.
Layton did not dispute that he wounded two people at Port Kaituma. What he and his lawyers did dispute was the conspiracy. His trial counsel argued that he had acted on his own, as a test of his loyalty to the group, and that he knew nothing of a separate plan to kill the congressman and others that day. The first jury, largely, accepted that account; the second did not, and its verdict on all four counts is the legal finding.
No court found that Layton himself caused the deaths of the congressman or the four others who died. His conviction for the congressman's death rests on conspiracy and on aiding and abetting. Guyana's murder charge of November 1978 did not go to trial, and its jury acquitted him of attempted murder. No one was ever charged in connection with the deaths at Jonestown itself.
November 17, 1978: the congressman arrives at Jonestown.
November 18, 1978: five people, the congressman among them, die at Port Kaituma, and ten are wounded; Layton is arrested.
November 22, 1978: charged with murder in Georgetown Magistrates Court; signs a confession.
March 14, 1979: sealed federal indictment returned in San Francisco under 18 U.S.C. 351.
February 1980: Guyana indicts him for attempted murder only.
May 23, 1980: a Georgetown jury acquits him on all four counts.
October 9, 1980: four-count federal indictment returned; unsealed October 10.
November 1980: handed to US marshals and flown to the United States; pleads not guilty on November 24.
August 14, 1981: first federal trial begins in San Francisco.
September 26, 1981: the jury deadlocks and the judge declares a mistrial; he is later released on bond.
January 11, 1982: the district court refuses the government's request to admit further statements; the government appeals.
August 1983: the Ninth Circuit reverses in part.
April 18, 1984: the district court excludes the recording of the evening of November 18.
July 29, 1985: the Ninth Circuit upholds that exclusion.
September 18, 1986: retrial begins in San Francisco.
December 1, 1986: convicted on all four counts.
1987: sentenced to life imprisonment.
February 21, 1989: the Supreme Court denies review.
1991: the Parole Commission sets his release for 2006, later moved to April 2004.
January 20, 2001: not among those granted clemency by the outgoing president.
September 2001: parole hearing in California.
April 2002: released on parole.
March 2011: federal parole supervision ends.