Raymond Oscar Butler was 18 years old on the night of March 25, 1994, when he took the lives of Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura in San Pedro, in the city of Los Angeles. Both young men were 19. Both had come to Los Angeles from Japan. Butler drove away in Ito's car. The two died two days later, after their parents had flown in from Japan.
The case led the news in Japan, and it drew expressions of regret from President Bill Clinton and from Walter Mondale, then the American ambassador in Tokyo. A Los Angeles County jury convicted Butler in 1996 of two counts of murder with special circumstances and fixed the penalty at death. While he was awaiting that trial, on March 26, 1995, a fellow inmate of the Los Angeles County jail, Tyrone Flemming, was killed. Butler was convicted of that murder in 1998, won a reversal in the California Supreme Court in 2009 on the ground that he had been wrongly denied the right to defend himself, and was convicted again, acting as his own lawyer, in 2012. He was sentenced to death a second time.
Three decades on, the case has not closed. In 2022 the Los Angeles County District Attorney asked a judge to set aside the first death sentence. In November 2026 Butler's name appeared on Governor Gavin Newsom's list of people whose death sentences he intends to commute to life without the possibility of parole.
Butler was 17 in March 1993, which places his birth in 1975 or 1976; his exact date of birth is not on record. He was 18 at the time of the San Pedro killings.
Relatives and Butler himself described his early life at the penalty phase of his 1996 trial. He began drinking at about the age of eight and was drinking regularly by 11 or 12. He used drugs from the age of 12 or 13 and harder drugs a year later, and by 15 or 16 he was selling them to pay for his own use. Relatives described a family history of drink and drug abuse. He was a slow learner and often absent, he had asthma, he passed through three junior high schools, and in the 10th grade he moved to a continuation school. He did not earn a high school equivalency. Relatives also recalled that he fought to protect his younger brother.
In March 1993, at 17, he attempted suicide, and he made two further attempts. Doctors who saw him at that time diagnosed major depression, abuse of several substances, antisocial personality traits and what they termed a "parent-child problem." In September 1993 he was convicted of residential burglary. He was on probation in March 1994, and on the day of the killings, by his own later account, he met with his probation officer and then spent the day drinking and taking drugs.
A clinical psychologist called by the defense in 1996 diagnosed abuse of several substances, a substance-induced psychotic disorder with delusions, borderline personality and moderate depression. The same witness found no brain damage and normal general adaptive functioning. Twenty-six years later the District Attorney's office would describe the young man of 1994 as a "cognitively immature teen-ager" who had endured violence and trauma in childhood and who had suffered from mental illness and cognitive impairment before and at the time of the crime.
Takuma Ito was a Japanese citizen who had been in the United States only a short time. Go Matsuura was an American citizen who had grown up mainly in Japan.
Friends described two well-liked young men who shared a love of photography.
On the night of Friday, March 25, 1994, the two young men were together in San Pedro.
Butler had come to San Pedro that evening with three young women: his sister-in-law, her niece and a friend of the niece. Both young men were fatally injured, and Butler drove away in Ito's car. A jury later found that he had killed them in the course of an attempted robbery and that he had taken the car by carjacking.
Both young men died on Sunday, March 27, after their families had arrived from Japan.
In Japan the deaths made every front page and led the evening newscasts. They came 17 months after the death of Yoshihiro Hattori, a 16-year-old from Japan killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in October 1992, and the two cases were set side by side. Japanese public television told its viewers that "this new tragedy shows us once again just what kind of place America has become." Japan's Foreign Ministry warned citizens to take particular care when visiting the United States.
The response in the United States reached the White House. Walter Mondale, then the American ambassador to Japan, publicly expressed regret to the Japanese people at the request of President Clinton, and the apology was carried on Japanese television. Police said the killings appeared to be a random carjacking in which race played no part.
In Los Angeles the case touched local politics as well. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the officers' union, took down billboards from its pay-raise campaign that had warned of the danger the city would face without its police.
Ito's car was recovered the day after the killings. On the first weekend police said they had few leads. The inquiry then moved quickly. An eyewitness picked Butler out of a photographic lineup, and detectives connected two young men to the crime by evidence.
On Wednesday, March 30, 1994, five days after the killings, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department arrested Butler and a 20-year-old Long Beach man in the San Pedro area. Police Chief Willie Williams announced the arrests at a televised press conference late that night. Investigators had concluded that Butler alone was responsible for the deaths. The three women who had ridden with Butler that night later gave evidence against him.
After his arrest Butler made three statements to police. In them he came to admit that he alone had killed the two young men, and he expressed remorse to the two young men and their families.
The fathers flew to Los Angeles and thanked the police. Shuji Matsuura, speaking in English, said the arrests were the news the families had been waiting for. The prosecution, he said, would take months, and the families would wait quietly for the court's decision. Only Americans, he added, could change the level of violent crime in their country. Akihiro Ito, Takuma's father, spoke through an interpreter. He called for an end to violence in the United States and said the arrests might help the families lay their sons to rest a little.
Butler was charged with two counts of murder with special circumstances, allegations that exposed him to a possible death sentence. The special circumstances alleged were murder in the commission of an attempted robbery and multiple murder. He was also charged with two counts of robbery and two counts of carjacking, with sentence enhancements under Penal Code sections 1203.06, 12022.5 and 12022.7. On April 12, 1994, he pleaded not guilty.
The second man was charged with receiving stolen property and with being an accessory after the fact. He faced a maximum term of a little over three years.
Butler spent the year before his trial in the Los Angeles County jail. On the morning of March 26, 1995, one year and a day after the San Pedro killings, a fellow inmate named Tyrone Flemming was killed in the jail. Prosecutors charged Butler and two other inmates in a separate case filed in the Compton courthouse, case TA041759.
Butler's conduct in custody continued to draw notice. In February 1996 he assaulted another inmate without provocation.
Butler asked in February 1996 to have the San Pedro and Compton cases tried together. His lawyers argued that the prosecution was keeping them apart to gain two chances at a death verdict. The prosecutor answered that the cases were unrelated in their facts, rested on different legal theories and involved codefendants who were not ready for trial. The trial court refused to join them, unwilling to take on the complications and delays of first hearing from the codefendants on severance.
Jury selection in the San Pedro case began on February 21, 1996, in the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Long Beach, before Judge James B. Pierce. The jury convicted Butler of both murders, found both special circumstances true and convicted him of the robbery and carjacking counts.
The penalty phase opened on March 20, 1996. The prosecution presented the killing of Flemming, the 1996 assault and the 1993 burglary conviction. The fathers of Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura testified about their sons and about what their deaths had done to their families. The defense called relatives and the psychologist, and Butler testified about his life and the day of the killings.
The jury found the decision hard. On the third day of deliberations it reported that it was hung. On Thursday, April 4, the court answered with a special instruction encouraging further deliberation. The jury went back to work, and on April 18 it reported a second deadlock. The foreperson told the judge the panel stood 11 to one. Asked one by one whether more time might produce a verdict, the foreperson said no, and one juror said, "I think so." The judge sent the jury back that afternoon, and the next morning it returned a verdict of death.
Judge Pierce entered the judgment of death on July 29, 1996.
Butler meant to defend himself in the Compton case. In December 1995 he filed a handwritten motion asking to represent himself, and on December 12, 1995, the trial court granted it, with his lawyer from the San Pedro case available as advisory counsel. The county moved early in 1996 to curtail his privileges as a self-represented prisoner because of his disciplinary record, and the court restricted them on February 1. After the death verdict in the San Pedro case his advisory counsel reported that he was losing all such privileges.
On December 10, 1996, a new judge revoked his right to represent himself on the strength of jail incidents. Butler fought the ruling through the spring of 1997, and on April 9 the court reaffirmed it. In September 1997 he renewed his request "adamantly," and the court granted it. On October 20, 1997, the court found that he could not be ready for trial under the jail's restrictions and took the right away again, without further inquiry.
Trial began on November 5, 1997, with Butler represented by counsel. The jury convicted him of first degree murder and found true the special circumstance that he had previously been convicted of murder. It returned a verdict of death, and the judgment was entered on February 20, 1998.
Both death judgments went to the California Supreme Court on automatic appeal, and both waited years for decision. In the San Pedro case the State Public Defender was appointed in May 2001, the record was filed in December 2003, and briefing ran from 2004 into 2008. The court heard argument in San Francisco on May 5, 2009.
On June 18, 2009, the court unanimously affirmed the convictions and the sentence of death. Justice Carol Corrigan wrote for all seven justices. The court rejected each of Butler's claims: the refusal to join the two cases, limits on jury questioning about the jail killing, the exclusion of a codefendant's statement as untrustworthy, the refusal to instruct on manslaughter and self-defense, and the handling of the deadlocked jury, which it found was not coercive. Rehearing was denied on August 12, 2009. A petition to the United States Supreme Court was filed on August 17, 2009.
The Compton case came out differently. On December 10, 2009, the same court, again in an opinion by Justice Corrigan, reversed the 1998 conviction and death sentence in their entirety. The majority held that the trial court had erred in deciding that Butler could not represent himself because of jail restrictions that followed from his own disciplinary violations. Misconduct in jail was not, under the precedent of the time, a valid ground for revoking the right, and restrictions on a prisoner's privileges did not cancel it. Under Faretta v. California and the cases that followed it, the denial of the right required reversal without any inquiry into prejudice. Justice Ming Chin, joined by Justice Marvin Baxter, dissented. He would have held that a defendant whose own violence in jail makes an effective defense impossible may be denied the right to act as his own lawyer. The majority answered that "there is no case that stands for that proposition."
The case was tried again in 2012 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, and this time Butler conducted his own defense. He complained to the court that jail rules left him no privacy when interviewing witnesses. At the end of January 2012 the jury convicted him of first degree murder in the death of Tyrone Flemming. Jurors, who were not told that he was already under sentence of death, found true the allegation that he had previously been convicted of murdering Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura.
Butler represented himself in the penalty phase as well. Deputy District Attorney David Barkhurst introduced the San Pedro convictions and told the jury that the guilt-phase evidence was "the tip of the iceberg." He described repeated run-ins with other inmates and with guards. Butler's mother testified for him and said that she loved her children unconditionally. On February 6, 2012, the jury recommended death.
Judge Ronald Coen denied Butler's motion for a new trial on May 11, 2012. Asked whether there was any legal cause why sentence should not be pronounced, Butler answered: "Other than I'm innocent and I shouldn't be sentenced to death, no." The judge imposed the death sentence and told him: "You're a killer, but you're a very intelligent man." Butler, then 36, said he intended to be an active participant in his appeal. The prosecutor said the People had always felt that death was the appropriate punishment. The automatic appeal from that judgment was still pending before the California Supreme Court in July 2022.
The families kept the memory of the two young men before the public. The parents established an annual film series in their sons' names, which a local college professor, Bruce R. Schwartz, chaired for 18 years. In Japan the parents kept shrines to their sons. Ito's younger brother became a lawyer representing the families of murder victims in Japan.
In March 2012 Schwartz traveled to Japan to interview the parents and friends of the two young men. The resulting documentary combined those interviews with pencil-sketch reconstructions and an account of the trial and the death verdict. It was shown at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro on October 24, 2012.
George Gascón took office as Los Angeles County District Attorney in December 2020 opposed to the death penalty in all cases, and his office began to revisit past capital judgments. Butler's case reached it after the California Supreme Court found a prima facie showing of juror misconduct in a habeas corpus petition he had filed in the San Pedro case.
On July 11, 2022, Deputy District Attorney Shelan Joseph filed a 264-page recommendation in the Superior Court asking that Butler be resentenced on the San Pedro murders to life without the possibility of parole. She wrote that he was "not the same, cognitively immature teen-ager who murdered two innocent victims in this case." The filing pointed to his youth, his childhood, his mental illness and cognitive impairment, and the difficulty the 1996 jury had in reaching a unanimous verdict. It argued that the death sentence he already carried in the Compton case weighed against further litigation of the first. The office said it was not seeking his release and that he would remain under sentence of death in case TA041759. Outside court, Joseph said the office was "not even looking" at the jail case. Butler was 46 or 47 at the time.
The office notified the families in Japan of their right to attend. Matsuura's father wrote back: "I think California judicial system is the habeas itself. It contains no right for victim, and only the right for convicted." On July 27, 2022, a judge set a hearing on the request for September 21, 2022. The ruling on the request is not on record.
California voters affirmed capital punishment at the ballot in 2012 and again in 2016. The state's last execution took place in 2006. In March 2019, about two months after taking office, Governor Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions and closed the state's death row by executive order, without changing any conviction or sentence. Prosecutors could still seek death sentences. Among Gascón's first directives as District Attorney was an end to seeking them in Los Angeles County.
The governor's power to change a sentence has a limit written into the state constitution. Under article V, section 8, the governor may not commute the sentence of a person twice convicted of a felony without the recommendation of the California Supreme Court, with at least four justices concurring. Butler, with convictions for three murders, falls in that group.
On November 5, 2026, near the end of his second term, Newsom announced that he would commute the death sentences of all 548 people then condemned in California to life without the possibility of parole, writing that "state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values." The commutations would leave every conviction and restitution order in place. For 382 people with more than one felony conviction he asked the Supreme Court for its recommendation. The Los Angeles County District Attorney, Nathan Hochman, acknowledged the governor's authority but said it did not extend to ending the death penalty, which only the Legislature or the voters could do. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation said it expected to file a challenge.
Butler's name appears on the governor's November 2026 list of intended clemency recipients, among those twice convicted of a felony. The entry gives one death judgment: case TA041759, from Los Angeles County, dated May 11, 2012. As of November 2026 the commutation had not been issued and awaited the recommendation of the California Supreme Court. He remains in the custody of the California prison system.
Butler has disputed the jail conviction. At his sentencing in 2012 he told the court that he was innocent. The jury and the court found otherwise, and that judgment was under automatic appeal as of July 2022.
In 2009 the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of a codefendant's statement from Butler's 1996 trial as untrustworthy; no court finding on the codefendants' own roles is part of Butler's case.
The juror misconduct claim in Butler's habeas corpus petition had been found to state a prima facie case by July 2022. Whether it was resolved, and how, is not on record. The outcome of the petition to the United States Supreme Court filed in August 2009 is also not on record.
March 1993: Butler, 17, attempts suicide.
September 1993: convicted of residential burglary.
March 25, 1994: Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura, both 19, are fatally injured in San Pedro.
March 27, 1994: both die after their families arrive from Japan.
March 30, 1994: Butler and a second man are arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department.
April 12, 1994: Butler pleads not guilty to two counts of murder.
March 26, 1995: Tyrone Flemming is killed in the Los Angeles County jail.
December 12, 1995: Butler is allowed to represent himself in the Compton case.
February 21, 1996: jury selection begins in the San Pedro case in Long Beach.
April 1996: after two deadlocks, the jury returns a verdict of death.
July 29, 1996: Judge James B. Pierce enters the judgment of death.
December 10, 1996: Butler's right to represent himself in the Compton case is revoked.
October 20, 1997: the right, restored in September, is revoked a second time.
February 20, 1998: judgment of death in the Flemming case.
June 18, 2009: the California Supreme Court affirms the San Pedro judgment.
December 10, 2009: the same court reverses the Flemming judgment.
January 2012: at a retrial, Butler is convicted of first degree murder.
February 6, 2012: the jury recommends death.
May 11, 2012: Judge Ronald Coen imposes the death sentence.
October 24, 2012: a documentary on the two young men is shown in San Pedro.
July 11, 2022: the District Attorney asks that the San Pedro death sentence be replaced with life without parole.
November 5, 2026: Governor Newsom announces plans to commute all California death sentences; Butler is on the list.