Scanlan averts death penalty Scanlan averts death penalty (September 03, 2004)

Murderer could face up to nine life sentences

After nearly two years of grabbing local headlines, confessed murderer Seti Scanlan was quietly sent away last week.

Now settled into his new cell at San Quentin State Prison, awaiting sentencing Sept. 20, Scanlan's grandstanding has ended, said Steve Wagstaffe, the San Mateo County deputy district attorney.

Scanlan, a former Mountain View resident whom Wagstaffe claimed loved to see his picture in the paper, is now just another inmate in a prison full of violent criminals.

"He's no longer any sort of a big man. He's just somebody who killed an innocent woman," Wagstaffe said. "I bet it was a culture shock for him.''

Scanlan faces up to nine life sentences for the many crimes he has admitted committing. He pleaded guilty in April 2003 to several shootings, the most notorious being the Oct. 11, 2002 Wells Fargo Bank robbery in which he killed bank manager Alice Martel, a 34-year-old mother of two sons.

"You kill a woman, that's a cowardly act,'' Wagstaffe said. In prison, Scanlan "will earn no respect for what he did,'' the prosecutor predicted.

If Scanlan receives the maximum of nine life sentences, it will virtually guarantee that no governor will ever pardon his crimes, Wagstaffe said. Instead, Scanlan will stay "in some dark corner of the most faraway prison in our state where he can just slowly die.''

That will have to serve as consolation for Wagstaffe and District Attorney Jim Fox, who wanted Scanlan to die for what he did. Martel's widower, David Martel, wanted Scanlan to die. And for a while it seemed that Scanlan, too, wanted to die. In his penalty trial earlier this year, Scanlan asked the jury to give him death.

Scanlan earned headlines with his behavior, pleading guilty, begging for the death penalty and filing motions to fire his attorneys because they disagreed with his death wish.

However, the jury would not give the prosecution and the defendant what they wanted. It deadlocked 9-3 in favor of the death penalty.

After Judge Robert Foiles declared a mistrial in June, the district attorney's office vowed to try for death again. But on Aug. 23, two weeks before the second trial was to start, prosecutors changed their position.

"The bottom line is what we thought our chances were on a retrial,'' Wagstaffe said, adding that trying Scanlan again could cost $500,000 and the results could well be the same.

"For this case, in this county, getting nine jurors [for death] is probably as good as we would do,'' he said.

The district attorney's office based its decision on interviews with numerous jurors, before and after the trial, in which it seemed that Scanlan's crimes -- killing Martel, shooting a convenience store clerk and shooting at several police officers, including Mountain View officer Cary Shueh -- were not heinous enough to warrant death in many jurors' minds.

"'I need to see a multiple murder,' 'I need to have a torture murder,' 'I need to have a child victim,''' prospective jurors said during jury selection, according to Wagstaffe. "We heard that all the time,'' he said.

Those on the jury who voted against killing Scanlan made similar comments, according to Wagstaffe. "It just simply did not appear to be the most evil of evil'' to them, he said.

Wagstaffe disagreed. "I think he does stand among the most evil,'' he said.

San Mateo County jurors have dramatically changed their views on the death penalty, Wagstaffe said just before Scanlan's trial began.

"I am concerned that in the past 10 years, the attitude has changed,'' he said in March. "But I will find that out firsthand.''

Wagstaffe said he still wishes Scanlan could have been sentenced to death. He still thinks he deserves it. And at one time, he said, jurors would have agreed.

"My feeling is that a decade ago a jury would have unanimously returned a verdict of death on Mr. Scanlan,'' he said.

-- Bay City News

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