20 August 2022 :
Death sentences lowered to life without parole for two men at DA’s request
James N. Blair and Anderson Hawthorne, who were sentenced to death, have been re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole at the request of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, court papers released Tuesday show.
In a written ruling, Superior Court Judge William Ryan vacated the death sentences of Blair and Hawthorne and ordered the two to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
The judge noted that the prosecution and the defense had filed a joint petition to vacate the death sentence of Blair, whom the defense alleges has Alzheimer’s-related dementia and cannot comprehend why he is in prison or that he is on death row.
“Petitioner is currently 82 years old and has little hope of any improvement to his condition. Indeed, petitioner will likely only continue to decompensate further for the remainder of his life,” the judge noted. “In the instant case, petitioner lacks both memory of his crime and any level of understanding as to why he is to be executed. Petitioner’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia has rendered him incapable of rationally understanding his death sentence and he is therefore incompetent to be executed.”
Blair was convicted in 1989 of the September 19841st-degree murder, along with the special circumstance allegation of murder by poison of his neighbor, Dorothy Green.
In Hawthorne’s case, the judge noted that the prosecution attached reports by two neuropsychiatrists who concluded that the defendant is intellectually disabled, mentally retarded and psychiatrically impaired and found that the evidence of intellectual disabilities “weighs heavily in favor of resentencing.”
Hawthorne, now 61, was 22 at the time of the Dec. 18, 1982 killings of Kirk Thomas and Jimmy Lee Mamon and the attempted murders of 3 other people in Los Angeles. Hawthorne had been transferred off of death row under a pilot program that allows condemned inmates to be housed at a lower security level where they have access to additional job placement opportunities, according to the judge’s ruling.
The re-sentencing requests are among those that have been made since District Attorney George Gascón took office in December 2020.
In a directive issued the day he was sworn in, the county’s top prosecutor said “a sentence of death is never an appropriate resolution in any case” and vowed that the office “will engage in a thorough review of every existing death penalty judgment from Los Angeles County with the goal of removing the sentence of death.”
5 former death row inmates, including four with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, have subsequently been re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to a report released in December 2021 by Gascón‘s office.
