SANTA ANA — Shortly after his family finished eating a pasta dinner, Edward Charles III bludgeoned and stabbed his father, strangled his mother, and stabbed and beat his kid brother to death, before setting their bodies afire in the family car.
Almost two years later, 35-year-old David Von Haden allegedly suffocated his young son and daughter to death, then shot and seriously wounded himself in the chest.
In Orange County's first two capital murder trials of 1998, jurors will be asked to vote in favor of the death penalty for these two men, whose unrelated cases nonetheless have something in common: The accused murderers are on trial for slaying members of their own families.
Legal experts say that a prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty for someone accused of killing a family member is rare.
"Human emotions are so involved and complicated that it's not the same as a stranger killing," said Laurie Levenson, an associate dean at Loyola Law School. "I think that's one of the reasons why they didn't seek the death penalty against O.J. Simpson."
And on the rare occasions when prosecutors do seek the death penalty in intra-family murders, they often encounter jury resistance, as they did in the cases of Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of killing their parents in Beverly Hills, and Susan Smith, a young mother convicted of drowning her two young sons in her car in a South Carolina lake.
But Levenson and others observe that this reluctance to seek the death penalty doesn't seem quite so strong in Orange County, where capital murder cases have climbed steadily in recent years, and where a record eight death sentences were ordered in 1997.
(On Friday, Daniel Carl Frederickson became the first Orange County defendant condemned to die this year when he was sentenced for the 1996 murder of a store manager in Santa Ana.)
Even when juries that have convicted defendants of murder deadlock in the penalty phase of a trial, prosecutors in most cases have been able to convince a second jury to recommend death.
"Orange County runs a very high percentage of cases that come back with death [sentence recommendations], and it would be foolish to think that doesn't go into the formula" of the prosecution's decision to seek a death penalty, said Deputy Public Defender Michael P. Giannini, who is defending Von Haden.
"It is interesting that throughout the country, and in many places in California, when the crime is in the family, they are looking at it differently."
