In the Sacramento County jail on the morning of January 24, 1952, a prisoner wrote a note addressed "To Jailer" and handed it to a deputy sheriff. In it he confessed that he had shot a man in the jungle. The writer was Lloyd Gomez, a migrant worker who had been arrested in Sacramento on January 16 on a charge of escaping from a county road camp, where he had been serving time on a vagrancy conviction. The note went on to list other killings. By the end of the next day Gomez had given the district attorney a statement about the shooting and had led deputies to the place where it happened.
The man he had shot was Warren Hood Cunningham, and the shooting had taken place on November 11, 1950, in the American River jungles, an undeveloped stretch of ground near Sacramento where migratory workers made their camps from time to time. Sacramento County tried Gomez only for Cunningham's death. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, fixed the penalty at death and found that he had been sane when he killed. On June 19, 1953, the Supreme Court of California affirmed the judgment in People v. Gomez, an opinion by Justice Schauer that upheld the conviction while condemning two newspaper articles published during the trial as indefensible.
That opinion, which sets out the trial record in detail, describes Gomez as a schizophrenic with an intelligence quotient of 61. It does not give his age, his birthplace or anything about his family.
The quarrel began with two cans of beer. Gomez had taken them from Cunningham, according to the facts the court drew from the trial record, and on November 11, 1950, Cunningham found him, accused him of the theft and brandished two knives at him. Gomez ran.
What he did next bore on the questions of deliberation and premeditation that the psychiatric evidence later addressed. He went back to his own camp, made his supper and ate it, and dug up a rifle he had buried there. Then he walked to another camp, where Cunningham was with a second man, and shot Cunningham dead. Afterward, by the evidence at trial, he said: "I don't care what I get. I knock him down." He also said that Cunningham had pulled a knife on him and that this was why he had shot him.
The other man at the camp, whom defense counsel described as nearly blind, went to a neighboring camp and had the man there report the shooting. Gomez got away by climbing onto a freight train, and at some point during his flight he destroyed the rifle. For the next fourteen months, the court wrote, he moved about California.
Gomez's travels ended in Sacramento on January 16, 1952, when he was arrested on the road camp escape charge. On January 21 the court appointed Orville Kline, an assistant public defender, to represent him on that charge, and Kline interviewed him the next day.
On the morning of January 24, Gomez wrote his note. The deputy who received it took it to the undersheriff, and Gomez was brought into an office and questioned by several officers, among them the undersheriff and a deputy. He admitted that he had written the note. When one of the deputies seemed to doubt him, he insisted that he was telling the truth. The officers testified that they made him no threats or promises, told him he did not have to talk, and did not ask whether he had a lawyer or tell him that he was entitled to one.
Kline came to the jail that same morning on the escape case. He was told that the district attorney was questioning Gomez, and he did not see him; the record, the supreme court noted, did not show that he had asked to see Gomez about the homicide. That afternoon the district attorney questioned Gomez and took a statement in which he described the killing of Cunningham in detail. On January 25, at the deputies' request, Gomez took them to the scene and showed them where and how the shooting had happened.
In those first statements he also described killing a number of other migrant men in other counties. The supreme court did not list those killings, but it observed that his accounts of them were in accord with the records of other actual, unsolved crimes. None of them was charged in the case that went to trial, and the jury saw only the one sentence of the note that concerned Cunningham.
At trial the defense offered its own explanation for the note. Gomez had been held in a room with other prisoners, whose company he disliked, and his lawyers argued that he had written it out of a desire to be moved.
The case passed through the hands of more than one lawyer before trial. In March 1952 a change took place in the public defender's office, which was then filled by a former deputy district attorney. On March 11 the district attorney told the court that it would not be fair to make Gomez accept representation by a former member of the prosecution, and the trial judge agreed. The judge had arranged for Peter Mannino, a lawyer who had never been connected with the district attorney's office, to take the case. Gomez accepted him, and Kline was relieved. On May 13, 1952, another private lawyer, C. K. Curtright, joined Mannino for the defense.
Gomez entered two pleas: not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity. The insanity plea was decided by the jury after its verdict on guilt.
Before the trial reached that stage, the defense raised a different question. On May 13, 1952, Gomez's lawyers moved to suspend the proceedings on the ground that he was unable to understand the case against him or to help in his own defense. The motion rested on section 1368 of the Penal Code. The judge heard conflicting psychiatric testimony and, the following Wednesday, ruled that "the doubt referred to in section 1368 of the Penal Code does not exist in the mind of the Court." The trial went on. On appeal the supreme court held that this decision lay within the judge's discretion.
Five psychiatrists testified in the case, three appointed by the court and two called by the defense. Their evidence went to two questions: whether Gomez's mental condition left him able to form the malice, deliberation and premeditation that first-degree murder required, and whether he had been legally sane at the time of the killing. The opinion does not name them.
The confession had been widely reported. Gomez's lawyers asked twice to move the trial out of Sacramento County. The first motion, made before he entered his pleas, was denied without prejudice, and a later motion was heard on February 27, 1952, and also denied. After a jury of twelve and one alternate had been chosen, the defense renewed the request and placed before the court newspaper articles published between January 25 and May 20, 1952. According to the supreme court's summary, those articles described nine killings and reported that he had admittedly slain 12 or 15 men.
The supreme court read the articles and found them factual reports rather than biased ones. It noted that both the prosecution and the defense had worked to keep the other homicides away from the jury. A few references slipped through anyway. On redirect examination by the prosecution, a deputy who had questioned Gomez answered a question by saying that the questioning had been about "twelve or fifteen cases." The judge struck the answer as not responsive. When the prosecutor then asked whether the questioning had concerned "other matters," the defense objected and the judge told the jury to disregard it. The supreme court called these incidents inadvertent and trifling, and held that they did not require a new trial.
The trial had been set for April 29, 1952. During jury selection, after some of the jurors had been chosen, Gomez tried to escape from the courtroom. The attempt caused considerable confusion. A woman in the room, whom the record did not identify, said loudly that she had known all along he was going to do it, and a bailiff drew his revolver. The defense moved to discharge the jury panel.
The trial judge refused, and the supreme court agreed. Because Gomez himself had caused the disturbance, the court applied the doctrine of invited error: a defendant could not win a new trial on the strength of a commotion he had started.
Two articles published while the trial was going on drew the court's sharpest language. On May 25, 1952, a newspaper article quoted a deputy district attorney who had no part in the case as saying that the escape attempt was the best advice defense counsel could have given Gomez. There was no evidence that his lawyers had given him any such advice. On May 29 another article appeared under the headline "Gomez Grins as he Tells of Jungle Death." Its photographs were presented as courtroom pictures but had not been taken in the courtroom, and it attributed to the district attorney a remark that had not been made there. The article led the defense to renew its motion for a mistrial.
Justice Schauer called the publications indefensible. Gomez's poverty and his mental illness, he wrote, did nothing to lessen the wrong. "This man had as much right to a fair and honest trial," the opinion said, "to be adjudged on the facts and law as adduced and stated in the courtroom, free from the emotional sway of published vilification," as any citizen of the land.
The court still found no grounds for reversal. The trial judge had admonished the jurors repeatedly and vigorously not to read about the case, discuss it, or listen to others discuss it, and the supreme court presumed that they had obeyed.
The jury found Gomez guilty of first-degree murder and fixed the penalty at death. In the sanity phase that followed, it found that he had been sane at the time of the crime. The trial court denied his motion for a new trial.
The judge's instructions on mental condition had been one of the defense's complaints. The jury had been told that an abnormal mental condition might make a person less likely, or unable, to form or hold a specific intent, and that it had to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of malice aforethought and of deliberation and premeditation even where a doubt arose from mental abnormality. The supreme court called the charge eminently fair and noted that the defense had not pointed to the particular instructions it found wanting.
The appeal went to the Supreme Court of California under subdivision (b) of section 1239 of the Penal Code. Gomez was represented there by Mannino and Curtright. The state was represented by Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, Deputy Attorney General Doris H. Maier and the Sacramento County district attorney, J. Francis O'Shea.
The defense raised a series of points: that the evidence was weak, though it did not contest its sufficiency; that the trial should have been suspended to decide his sanity; that publicity before and during the trial had denied him a fair hearing; that the jury should have been discharged after the escape attempt; that his statements had been admitted without a proper showing that they were voluntary; that references to other offenses had reached the jury; and that the instructions on his mental condition were inadequate.
The court rejected each one. On the confessions, it pointed to the officers' testimony that no threats or promises had been made, and it held that the weight of the statements was a question for the jury. On June 19, 1953, sitting in bank, it affirmed both the judgment and the order denying a new trial. Chief Justice Gibson and Justices Shenk, Carter, Traynor and Spence concurred in Justice Schauer's opinion.
Gomez was tried for one death. The killings of the other men he described in January 1952 were not brought before a jury, and the court record does not give their names, their number, the places or the dates. What the record does say is limited: his accounts covered a number of other migrants in other counties, and the state supreme court found that those accounts matched the records of real, unsolved crimes. The figure of nine killings, and his reported admission to 12 or 15, come from 1952 newspaper reports as the court summarized them, and they were never tested at trial.
November 11, 1950: after a quarrel over two cans of beer, Lloyd Gomez shoots Warren Hood Cunningham in the American River jungles near Sacramento, escapes on a freight train and later destroys the rifle.
November 1950 to January 1952: he moves about California.
January 16, 1952: arrested in Sacramento on a charge of escaping from a county road camp, where he had been held on a vagrancy conviction.
January 21, 1952: assistant public defender Orville Kline is appointed on the escape charge.
January 24, 1952: Gomez hands a deputy a note addressed "To Jailer" confessing to the shooting; he is questioned by officers and, that afternoon, by the district attorney.
January 25, 1952: he leads deputies to the scene of the shooting.
February 27, 1952: a motion to move the trial out of the county is heard and denied.
March 11, 1952: after a former deputy district attorney takes over the public defender's office, the court arranges for Peter Mannino to represent Gomez.
April 29, 1952: date set for trial.
May 13, 1952: C. K. Curtright joins the defense; the defense moves to suspend the trial on the ground of present insanity; the judge later finds no doubt as to his sanity.
May 1952: Gomez tries to escape from the courtroom during jury selection; newspaper articles of May 25 and May 29 misreport the case.
After the trial: the jury convicts him of first-degree murder, fixes the penalty at death and finds him sane at the time of the crime; a new trial is denied.
June 19, 1953: the Supreme Court of California affirms in People v. Gomez, 41 Cal.2d 150.