Similar O.C. Capital Cases Yield Opposite Outcomes : Justice: Variety of factors influence jury decisions on who gets death penalty and who gets life in prison.

In the summer of 1990, Orange County was shocked by two unrelated crimes that left four young people dead and two others facing the gas chamber.

There were numerous gang-related killings around the county that summer--tragic, fatal shootings involving adolescent friends and family members and the slayings of several babies.

But the cases of Maria (Rosie) del Rosio Alfaro and Gregory Allan Sturm were especially brutal and horrific. Alfaro, then 18, was charged with stabbing a 9-year-old girl more than 50 times in her Anaheim home. Sturm, then 21, was accused of executing three former co-workers at a Tustin auto parts store.

Through the vagaries of the judicial process, both cases came to trial in May. Last week, juries deliberating three floors apart in the Orange County Courthouse returned strikingly different recommendations on punishment, propelling Alfaro to Death Row and Sturm--at least for the moment--toward life imprisonment.

“In hearing about two cases like this, I’m not surprised about . . . these disparate outcomes,” said William J. Bowers, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston who is conducting a study on jury behavior in death penalty cases.

“We see that in many of the cases--that being the horrible killings get life sometimes and death other times. We cannot explain the difference yet,” said Bowers, whose two-year study of 1,500 jurors in capital cases, funded by the National Science Foundation, is now at its midpoint.

“The best I can do is to confirm that the disparity is not unique or idiosyncratic, nor is it uncommon,” he said.

Steven Parnes, a staff attorney with the San Francisco-based California Appellate Project, which handles Death Row appeals, added: “There are as many different answers as there are people sitting in the jury box. It’s a very, very subjective response. That’s inevitable.”

Alfaro and Sturm killed people they knew, in each case to raise money to buy drugs. Defense lawyers for both argued that their clients’ actions were impaired by cocaine use and, during the penalty phase of their trials, that they had troubled adolescences but no previous records of violent offenses.

Neither defendant took the witness stand during the guilt phase, although prosecutors introduced tearful, videotaped confessions both had given to police. And while Alfaro and Sturm were each found guilty of their crimes after short jury deliberations, these same juries deadlocked 10 to 2 when it came to deciding between life in prison or death in the gas chamber, after exhaustive deliberations.

The jury that convicted Alfaro deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of a death sentence. A mistrial was declared, and a second jury last week recommended the gas chamber for Alfaro, the mother of four children under the age of 5.

One day after the second Alfaro jury recommended the death penalty, Sturm’s jury deadlocked 10 to 2--for life in prison. Prosecutors must decide by Friday whether to retry the penalty phase.

Why the different outcomes?

Despite the numerous similarities of the two cases, there were also critical differences. Among them, say experts: Sturm is white and was raised in a middle-class home; Alfaro is a Latina and grew up poor.

“He’s a nice-looking young man. He doesn’t look dangerous. He doesn’t look menacing,” characteristics that may have affected the predominantly white, middle-class jury, if only “subconsciously,” said Sturm’s prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis R. Rosenblum.

Sturm’s background may have meant the jury “better identified with him,” said Parnes, of the California Appellate Project, while Alfaro’s background “may have created some distance between them.”

Yet an influential capital punishment survey in Georgia has found that the race of the accused is less a factor in who gets the death penalty than the race of the victim.

The Georgia study, the findings of which were subsequently reflected in other states, found that a defendant who killed a white person was 11 times more likely to get the death penalty than a defendant who killed a black person. None of the 19 executions in this country this year have been for the murder of a black person, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. Of 176 executions since 1976, in only one case was the defendant a white person who had killed a black person.

In both the Sturm and Alfaro cases, all the victims were white.

A more applicable, albeit unspoken, consideration for jurors may have been the age and gender of the victims.

“The life of a 9-year-old girl shouldn’t be seen as worth more than a 21-year-old man, but people do see it that way,” said one Orange County prosecutor, who asked not to be named.

“Children as victims are clearly extremely sympathetic to jurors because of their innocence,” said Bowers, of Northeastern’s Capital Jury Project, which encompasses 12 states, including California.

But Lisa J. Nichols, one of two jurors who voted for the death penalty for Sturm, disagreed.

“A human life is a human life, no matter how old,” she said.

Then there is the brutality factor. Alfaro stabbed Autumn Wallace more than 50 times on June 15, 1990, and left her to bleed to death in her burglarized home. Alfaro later received about $300 for what she sold from the house. The girl, who was home alone, had let Alfaro in because she knew her as a friend of her older sister.

Sturm robbed, then bound and shot in the head three young men he used to work with at the Super Shops store in Tustin on Aug. 20, 1990, escaping with about $1,100. At least one of the victims had begged for his life, Sturm told police.

Alfaro and Sturm, prosecutors argued, murdered to eliminate any witnesses to their thefts.

In the areas of legal competence and strategy, there were similarities and differences between the two cases.

In the Sturm case, both Rosenblum, the prosecutor, and Deputy Public Defender William G. Kelley were handling their first capital case. In the Alfaro case, both the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles J. Middleton, and the defense lawyer, William M. Monroe--a respected, experienced private attorney assigned to the case--had handled death penalty cases before.

In the Sturm case, Kelley called experts in cocaine addiction, a factor cited by some jurors who voted for life in prison. Monroe called no such experts for Alfaro, relying instead on the testimony of psychiatrists and psychologists.

But interviews with more than a dozen jurors in both cases suggest that the keys to the different outcomes are more subtle than the race of the defendants; the age, gender and number of victims; or the quality of the defense.

Two of those who voted for life in prison, one on the Sturm jury and another on the first Alfaro jury, said that they perceived a lack of premeditation in the killings.

On the other hand, several jurors on the first and second Alfaro juries who voted for the death sentence cited what they felt was her lack of remorse.

Others who supported the death penalty for Alfaro focused on the nature of her relationship with Autumn Wallace and the Wallace family. “They actually opened their house to her,” said Michael C. Sanders, a member of the first Alfaro jury. “She ate at their table. The violation of trust was an extremely big point.”

John W. Abouchar, who served as foreman of the first Alfaro jury, said: “A big factor was that house had offered her shelter and food, and to that house she came back and desecrated it. She came back and killed the little girl for a few bucks.”

For many defendants, said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “it will ultimately come down to which 12 people you get who are sympathetic to you and which are not.”

* ALFARO CONFRONTS FUTURE: Facing death sentence, she denies guilt, blames drugs. A39