The California Supreme Court today unanimously reversed Kenneth Earl Gay's death sentence

The California Supreme Court today unanimously reversed Kenneth Earl Gay's death sentence for the 1983 murder of Police Officer Paul Verna, saying the trial judge erred because his lawyers were not allowed to present evidence suggesting that a co-defendant was the person who shot the officer. The panel sent the case back to Los Angeles Superior Court for a new penalty trial to determine whether Gay should be sentenced to death or life in prison without possibility of parole. The ruling does not affect Gay's conviction for participating in the crime. The court upheld his conviction in 1993. The co-defendant, Raynard Cummings, was also sentenced to death and both his conviction and death penalty have been upheld by the court. The Court found that San Fernando Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt erred by barring Kenneth Earl Gay from offering "significant mitigating evidence" during the penalty phase of his retrial in 2000. The Court said "there is a reasonable possibility" that jurors would have recommended a life prison term without parole -- instead of death -- had they been allowed to hear mitigating evidence, including four statements in which co-defendant Raynard Cummings claimed to be the sole shooter. "Because Raynard Cummings's admissions that he was the only shooter and the corroborating testimony of the eyewitnesses proffered by defendant related to the circumstances of the crime, we find that the trial court abused its discretion in excluding this evidence as irrelevant at the penalty retrial," Baxter wrote. Wiatt committed suicide in February 2005 in a Santa Clarita park in the midst of a phone conversation with law enforcement officials over allegations of child abuse. The case is People v. Gay, 08 S.O.S. 1602.