Police Killer’s Case Shows Pitfalls : Defendants Risk Their Lives Representing Themselves

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Daniel Steven Jenkins said, “I’m going to address you this evening. . . .” The hour was not quite noon, but Jenkins’ nervous error was understandable.

The 33-year-old high school dropout was squaring off against a veteran prosecutor who was seeking Jenkins’ death for a murder conviction. Acting as his own attorney and insisting on his innocence, Jenkins asked jurors to spare his life.

It didn’t work. On Tuesday, the seven-man, five-woman panel recommended that Jenkins die in the gas chamber for the Halloween Day, 1985, slaying of off-duty Los Angeles Police Detective Thomas C. Williams.

Three weeks earlier, the Van Nuys Superior Court jury had convicted Jenkins of ambushing the officer and shooting him eight times with a silencer-equipped machine pistol in front of Williams’ 6-year-old son.

Despite the brutality of the crime, one juror said, Jenkins probably could have escaped the death penalty had he not dismissed his two court-appointed lawyers and taken over the job after his conviction. In fact, juror Ricky Gilmore said he favored sparing Jenkins the gas chamber until he heard his shrewd, unremorseful courtroom arguments.

Because all it takes is one dissenting juror’s voice--in this case, potentially Gilmore’s--to scuttle a death penalty verdict, Jenkins could have received life in prison without parole if he had remained seated and silent at the defense table. Although other jurors disagreed with Gilmore, the case illustrates the pitfalls of acting as one’s own attorney in the courtroom.

“Jenkins would have fared a lot better if he hadn’t represented himself, dramatically better,” Gilmore said after the trial. “He showed us that he had no remorse toward Thomas Williams.”

Jenkins is one of a small percentage of capital murder defendants who serve as their own attorneys during part or all of their trials. They are called pro per , from the Latin in propria persona , which means representing yourself. Each person, if mentally competent, has a right to represent himself in court.

In California, about 4% of the 293 defendants sentenced to die since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 have acted as their own attorneys at some point during their trials, according to the California Appellate Project, a private, nonprofit group that assists lawyers on death penalty appeals. Nationwide, the estimate is that 5% of Death Row inmates served as their own attorneys, said Tanya Coke, research director for the capital punishment project of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City.

The old saw says one who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. There are no official statistics on the success rate of pro pers in capital cases. But judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors say it is an unwise choice in any case, particularly a capital one.

‘It’s Suicide’

“My opinion is it’s suicide,” defense attorney Howard L. Weitzman said. “I think it’s asking for the maximum penalty.”

“More often than not, pro pers in capital cases end up with the death penalty,” said Charles A. Gessler, who coordinates capital cases for the Los Angeles County public defender’s office. Added defense attorney Leslie H. Abramson: “It’s a very, very rare defendant who would do better pro per in a death case.”

Some defendants choose to represent themselves because they hope to lay the groundwork for legal error and a subsequent appeal, said Tom Wilhite, death penalty coordinator for the state attorney general’s office in Los Angeles.

Jenkins, however, insisted on handling his own defense in part because of ego and in part because he disagreed with his lawyers, said Howard R. Price, one of two attorneys who represented Jenkins during the first part of his trial.

Rankled at Price’s insistence that he not testify, Jenkins “got the idea in his mind that it was necessary for him to speak directly to the jury,” Price said.

‘Sorry for Him’

During the first part of his trial, when Jenkins sat quietly at the counsel table flanked by his attorneys, jurors felt “empathy for him, sorry for him,” said Gilmore, 33, a golf course superintendent.

“We never heard his voice once. We never were exposed to his personality and his mannerisms,” he said. “He was always dressed nice. He was real mild and calm. I felt real bad for him.”

Nagged by lingering doubt, Gilmore said, he and other jurors were leaning toward a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But Jenkins later “stood up and started cross-examining the witnesses. It showed us a different side of him.”

The opposite view was held by juror Joe Sims, 32, an accountant at Rockwell International, who said several jurors “had problems giving death because Danny gave his own closing argument.”

‘Made It Harder’

“We didn’t look at him as a person until he got up and started representing himself,” Sims said. “It made it harder to give a living human being the death sentence, a human being who stood there and very intelligently defended himself.”

Some jurors said Jenkins’ self-representation made no difference.

“I really can’t say that representing himself helped him or hurt him one way or the other,” said jury foreman Peter A. Barnett, 42, an employee relations consultant at UCLA. Said another juror who asked not to be named: “I believe he would have gotten the death penalty either way. We tried to not be swayed by emotional considerations.”

The perils of self-representation are so well-known that judges are required to warn potential pro pers of the disadvantages. Superior Court Judge Judith Meisels Ashmann repeatedly warned Jenkins that it was inadvisable. She also instructed jurors not to be swayed by the fact that he had decided to represent himself.

Death penalty law is in such flux that even practicing attorneys have trouble keeping up, Gessler noted.

‘Performance Exceptional’

Although Price said he thinks that Jenkins hurt his case by representing himself, he was “smoother than 50% of the lawyers that come into court. I have never seen a pro per handle himself as well as Danny Jenkins has. His performance technically was exceptional. Most pro pers make fools of themselves and alienate the jury and that didn’t happen.”

Courtroom observers, including jurors, agreed that although his grammar was bad, Jenkins came across as bright, confident and capable in such areas as cross-examination.

“Are you telling this court. . . ? Is it or is it not true. . . ?” Jenkins asked prosecution witnesses, confidently glancing at a series of neatly written notes.

“He reminded me of me,” said Price, who believes that Jenkins adopted much of his courtroom style from watching him during court proceedings.

But while such tactics may be effective for a lawyer, it may have made Jenkins appear combative and antagonistic, exactly opposite the image he needed to project, Price said.

Love for Grandmother

Jenkins used several tactics praised by defense attorneys, such as producing witnesses who portrayed him as a good neighbor and a good Samaritan who stopped to phone an ambulance for a crash victim on the Santa Monica Freeway. Other witnesses told of Jenkins’ love for his grandmother and upbringing in a series of foster homes because of his mother’s mental infirmities.

Jenkins sought to attack the death penalty by telling jurors that even Libya has abolished it and by holding up a sign that said: “People kill people to show people that killing people is wrong.” He said he did not want to die.

Jurors were touched, Gilmore, Sims and Barnett agreed.

Self-representation can humanize a defendant, making it harder to sentence him to death--if he’s likable, said defense attorney Harland W. Braun. “But if he is not likable, he’s better off sitting there quietly and allowing the lawyer to represent him.”

In Jenkins’ case, some jurors came to see him as a shrewd, articulate man capable of planning and carrying out Williams’ murder, which was plotted in retaliation for his testimony at a trial, Gilmore said. Added Barnett: “He struck me as cold.”

“Had he come out and said he was sorry, he would have never gotten the death penalty because a lot of the jurors felt life in prison without the possibility of parole was sufficient,” Gilmore said.