On Wednesday, a Los Angeles superior court judge upheld a jury’s recommendation of the death penalty for 63-year-old Lonnie David Franklin Jr.
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Lonnie Franklin Jr., known by the nickname the “Grim Sleeper”, has been sentenced to death in connection with the serial killings of women in the Los Angeles area from the 1980’s to 2007, The Associated Press said.
Today, following the conviction of the so-called Grim Sleeper, Franklin has been sentenced to death for each and every count of murder that he had been convicted of and the court room was a scene of tremendous drama and sorrow, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Judge Kathleen Kennedy, a 28-year veteran of the court, said she concluded Franklin preyed on defenseless women because of deep-seated hatred toward them.
A garbage collector convicted of the “Grim Sleeper” killings that terrorised southern Los Angeles for more than two decades has been sentenced to death.
The killing spree was the subject of a 2014 HBO documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who claimed the Los Angeles police failed to properly investigate because the victims were mainly drug addicts and prostitutes. A Polaroid photo of the partly nude woman bleeding from her wound was found in his garage after his arrest.
Ms Washington testified against him at the trial, and pointing at him in court said: “That’s the person who shot me”.
The prosecutors – who wrote that Franklin has shown “absolutely no remorse” – called him “completely irredeemable” and a “psychopathic, sadistic serial killer who takes joy in inflicting pain on women and killing them”. During the trial, his lawyers sought to raise doubts about DNA evidence and suggested another “mystery man” was behind the killings.
The judge said there was “nothing really presented in mitigation by the defence”, adding that the aggravating circumstances in the case warranted the death penalty.
Amster also asked for a new trial because he said Silverman engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by rolling her eyes in a way that mocked the defense in front of the jury and elicited snickers from family members of the victims.
Franklin was connected to the crimes after a task force that re-examined the old cases discovered that DNA from Franklin’s son, which was in a database because of an arrest, showed similarities to genetic evidence found on some of the “Grim Sleeper” victims.
Silverman said they were unsubstantiated allegations and accused Amster of bullying tactics, name-calling and dishonesty.
“I’ve never seen your face”. “I’m sick and exhausted of it”.
The Los Angeles Times reports that some relatives of victims attended Thursday’s sentencing hearing, at which Kennedy read the names of the 10 who were killed. He killed women sporadically but all were either shot or strangled, and their bodies dumped in alleyways close to Franklin’s home in South LA.
The killer earned his moniker because of the apparent hiatus from 1988 to 2002, which police once theorized was due to him being imprisoned or laying low after Washington survived.
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To trap the Grim Sleeper, a detective went undercover as a busboy at a pizza parlor and collected utensils used by Franklin while he was a party.
