27 December 2017 :

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has overturned the 1991 death sentence imposed on Estonian national Tauno Waidla for the July 12, 1988 murder of Viivi Piirisild. The court upheld Waidla's conviction, but granted him a new penalty hearing, finding his lawyer ineffective for failing to investigate and present mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of his case. In 2005 (see March 3, 2005) the California Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence imposed on Waidla's co-defendant, fellow Estonian Peeter (also Peter) Sakarias because prosecutors had made conflicting claims about the roles each of the men were accused of playing in the murder. The victim was an Estonian-American woman who helped the two after they fled to the United States via West Berlin after defecting from a Soviet army unit in then East Germany in 1987.