Jury Rejects Death Penalty in Drug Gang Killings

A federal jury rejected the death penalty yesterday for a Northeast Washington gang member they had convicted in the killings of four people -- the latest setback for the Justice Department in its effort to press for capital punishment in the District.

Larry Gooch, 27, will be sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole. His case marked the third time in recent years that the Bush administration failed to persuade a Washington jury to impose the death penalty for a convicted murderer. D.C. law does not provide for capital punishment, but federal law gives prosecutors the option to seek it in certain cases.

Public sentiment runs high against the death penalty in the District, where voters rejected executions in a nonbinding 1992 referendum.

Just before noon, the jurors told U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer that they had decided the nature of Gooch's crimes was not sufficiently heinous to make him a candidate for the death penalty.

"I hope the Department of Justice gets the message," said James G. Connell III, one of Gooch's defense attorneys. "If we're going to have a death penalty, it needs to be reserved for the worst of the worst in the range of murder cases -- and this was not the worst of the worst."

Evidence during the trial showed Gooch was an "enforcer" for the drug-dealing M Street gang in Northeast's Kingman Park from the late 1990s until he was locked up in 2003. Last week, the 12 jurors who had listened to the trial evidence over the past four months found Gooch guilty of pulling the trigger in three slayings and helping in a fourth.

The jury began a new phase of the case Tuesday, deliberating on whether the death penalty applied to Gooch. The threshold legal question was whether two of Gooch's murders were part of a single criminal attack.

The two killings occurred in February 2003. Prosecutors alleged that Gooch came upon Calvin Cooper and his girlfriend, Yolanda Miller, and shot Miller six times in the back and head, leaving her in a snowbank. Then he came back and shot Cooper three times in a nearby alley, prosecutors said.

Gooch killed the pair, the government alleged, because he suspected the two were stealing stashed drugs from the M Street gang and cooperating with law enforcement.

Police found Cooper's body that night but didn't find Miller's body until the next day. Police said that they had searched the crime scene thoroughly for two hours. Gooch's defense lawyers argued that Miller had been killed earlier and her body had been dumped there after police conducted their first search. The jurors concluded that, on the lack of Miller's blood at the scene and other crime scene inconsistencies, they had reasonable doubt about whether the killings took place at the same time.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has criticized the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney's office in Washington for pursuing capital punishment in the District, said the jury's decision vindicates her position.

"It's entirely predictable, and it's time for the U.S. attorney to stop wasting the taxpayers' money trying to get the death penalty in a jurisdiction that has shown over and over again it will not give the death penalty," Norton (D) said.

She said the federal prosecutor appears to be trying to "make a point" by pushing such cases but only offends the city's constituents and hurts families with lengthy trials.

U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor said that Gooch was clearly "a dangerous individual" and noted that he will be locked up for the rest of his life. In all, Gooch was convicted Friday of 23 of the 35 drug-dealing and violent crime charges brought against him.

"That's a good result for this office, but more importantly, for this community," Taylor said.

Federal prosecutors must apply the law evenly across the country, Taylor added, and not tailor their approach to the region.

"Our job is to enforce the law, including the federal death penalty law. And essential to a just and fair federal criminal justice system is the principle that federal laws are enforced uniformly throughout the nation," he said. "It is up to us to determine when to seek the death penalty, and it is up to the jury to determine whether that punishment is appropriate."