SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Convicted murderer Scott Peterson's bid for a retrial will have to wait another month.
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San Mateo County court officials said Peterson's next hearing will now take place on Aug. 11 at 10 a.m., rather than Wednesday morning, after one of Peterson's attorneys tested positive for COVID-19. Peterson himself is now on a "loose quarantine" at San Quentin State Prison following a coronavirus exposure in his pod, the official said.
Peterson's lawyers and the Stanislaus County district attorneys were scheduled to hold a status conference on Tuesday before oral arguments in front of Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo the following morning at 11:30. Massullo is set to decide if Peterson received a fair trial in his 2004 murder conviction.
Peterson, 49, was convicted of killing his wife Laci – who was eight months pregnant at the time she disappeared – and their unborn son, Conner, on Christmas Eve 2002. Her body was found in the San Francisco Bay nearly four months after she went missing.
Peterson was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 2005, but the California Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 2020 after ruling that potential jurors who disagreed with the death penalty were improperly dismissed from the jury pool.
A San Mateo County judge resentenced Peterson last year to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Since then, Peterson and his attorneys have sought a retrial, arguing that a juror who helped convict him committed “prejudicial misconduct” by not disclosing that she was a domestic violence victim and that she, in 2000, had sought a restraining order against her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend out of fears she would harm the juror’s unborn baby.
That juror, Richelle Nice, testified earlier this year that she didn’t harbor any biases against Peterson before the trial and decided to convict him after hearing the evidence prosecutors presented.
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