LA jurors recommend execution for 'Grim Sleeper' killer
LOS ANGELES: Jurors on Monday recommended the death penalty for a Los Angeles garbage collector convicted of the "Grim Sleeper" killings that terrorized southern Los Angeles for more than two decades.
Lonnie David Franklin had been convicted of 10 counts of first-degree murder for the killings of nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007.
The same jury at Los Angeles Superior Court deliberated for five hours over two days before recommending the death penalty, with sentencing set for August 10.
"He's a prolific serial killer and he's evil," Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman had told the court, adding that there was a "long line of victims behind him."
The prosecution presented evidence that it said linked him to the killings of a further four other women between 1984 and 2005, although authorities suspect Franklin is behind dozens more murders.
"You can either give mercy to him — the serial killer — or you can impose justice. Death is the only just punishment for this defendant ... (for) the 14 lives he stole," the prosecutor said.
The court heard Franklin had committed crimes dating back to the 1974 kidnapping and gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Germany while he was in the US military.
The 63-year-old was a "sexual predator" and "career criminal" whom DNA evidence showed had acted alone, Silverman said.
Franklin stalked the streets of South Los Angeles at a time when an epidemic of crack cocaine plagued the neighborhood, the authorities say. — AFP
Several of his victims were prostitutes and drug addicts whom he shot or strangled, dumping their bodies in alleyways or trash bins. He raped some before killing them.
Prosecutors said Franklin took advantage of some of his victims' addiction to crack to lure them to his backyard camper with money and drugs before killing them.
Investigators searching his home found nearly 200 pictures and videos of women, many of whom have not been identified.
Defense attorney Dale Atherton had urged the seven-woman, five-man panel to recommend life without parole, arguing that a death sentence would delay the healing process for the victims' families.
Franklin was given the moniker "Grim Sleeper" because of a 13-year gap in the murders.
Although Franklin was arrested in July 2010 after his DNA was connected to some of the victims, appeals and judicial wrangling repeatedly delayed efforts to bring him to trial.
The killing spree was the subject of a 2014 HBO documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who claims the Los Angeles police failed to properly investigate the murders because the victims were mainly drug addicts and prostitutes.
It has been a decade since the last execution in California. Clarence Ray Allen was given a lethal injection on January 17, 2006 after being convicted of paying a fellow inmate to commit three murders.
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