David Allen Raley (born November 9, 1961) is a convicted murderer and currently on San Quentin's death row. He was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Jeanine Grinsell, aged 16, and attempted murder of Laurie McKenna, aged 17. The two girls were attacked and kidnapped on February 2, 1985, at the Carolands mansion in Hillsborough in San Mateo County, where Raley, then aged 23, was working as a security guard.
Front of Carolands, photographed by Jack Boucher for HABS in 1974
Carolands, a mansion completed in 1914 for Harriet Pullman Carolan, had been vacant since the mid-1970s and was not open to the public.[2] However, Raley, who worked as a security guard there, was known to give unauthorized tours occasionally. Raley was especially receptive to giving tours to high school-age girls, and he would provide "salacious commentary" during the tours; for example, he once requested a young female tourist enter a safe and scream to demonstrate how soundproof the location was, after which he commented that he could kill someone in the basement and no one would hear.[3] On Saturday, February 2, 1985, Raley was interviewed by a journalism student who was writing a story about the mansion, telling her, "You wouldn't believe the things girls offer me. Food, money, sex – anything to get inside."[2]
Later that same Saturday, McKenna, and Grinsell came to explore Carolands; they had heard stories from other students that unofficial tours were available.[4] Raley agreed to allow them to enter provided they parked their car where it could not be seen. During the tour, he commented that guards would sometimes receive sexual favors in exchange for allowing entry; after the tour, he hid the girls in a basement safe, saying that police dogs had arrived and that he could lose his job for allowing the tour. They begged not to be hidden there, and although he assured them he would not close the door, he did and would not release them until they had undressed to their underwear.[3][4] During their captivity at the mansion, he sexually assaulted, beat, and stabbed the two girls. He later bound Grinsell with rope and rolled McKenna up in a carpet, then hid them in the trunk of his car,[3] a 1973 Plymouth.[5]
Raley's shift at the mansion ended at 4PM, but he was not relieved of his duty until his supervisor arrived at 5:15PM. He drove to and parked in the garage of his house in south San Jose, where he let the two girls out of the trunk; McKenna asked to be taken to a hospital and swore not to tell anyone who had injured them, but Raley responded with a silent "death stare" of hatred. After hearing voices, he pushed them back into the trunk and threatened to kill them if they did not remain quiet. At about 7PM, he emerged from the garage into the house, which he shared with his sister and father, and refused dinner, then watched TV and played Monopoly with his sister[5] until approximately 11PM. His father returned to the house after midnight; Raley told him he had cleaned the garage.[3]
Later, Raley moved the car with the girls still inside the trunk from the garage to a parking spot across the street. After midnight, he drove to a ravine off Silver Creek Road; approximately 10 miles (16km) southeast of downtown San Jose[2] and beat them again before dumping them into the ravine, which was used as a makeshift garbage dump.[3][4][5] The overnight weather included drizzle[5] and temperatures close to freezing.[6] At daybreak, McKenna, bloodied and battered, pulled herself out of the ravine and flagged down a passing pickup truck at approximately 8:30AM.[5] Three cars passed without stopping before the truck stopped.[4]A jogger who encountered the two girls would later testify at a preliminary hearing that both were conscious and able to talk.[7] Both Grinsell and McKenna identified Raley as their assailant.[2] At the time they were found, both girls were still alive, but Grinsell died at 11:35AM[5] from blood loss, shock, and hypothermia at Santa Theresa Hospital, where they had been taken for treatment. She had been stabbed 41 times, had suffered a skull fracture,[3] and had no measurable blood pressure.[6]
Trial
Raley was arrested on the evening of February 3[2] and charged on February 6 with one count of murder, one count of attempted murder, two counts of assault with intent to commit rape, and two counts of kidnapping; due to the special circumstances, which included the torture of the two girls, he was eligible for the death penalty.[6]
Jury selection lasted approximately two months, and Raley's trial began in March 1987.[8] During the trial, Raley presented evidence that he was not alone in providing unauthorized tours to young people, including boys, and that Grinsell might have survived had she been immediately treated for hypothermia.[3] He was convicted on the counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and kidnapping with special circumstances on April 22, 1987, and a second trial would commence on May 5 to determine if he would receive the death penalty.[9]
The penalty phase trial jury deadlocked 7-5 in favor of the death penalty,[10] and a mistrial was declared on May 15, 1987.[3] The penalty phase was retried starting on February 29, 1988, and Raley was sentenced to death on May 17.[5][10] During the penalty phase retrial, the prosecution presented criminal incidents from Raley's juvenile record, which included lewd acts with children that occurred when he was a teenager.[3]
Raley's automatic appeal before the Supreme Court of California was largely denied in 1992. En banc, the Supreme Court of California upheld his conviction on almost all of the criminal charges and death sentence; the Court overturned the conviction for attempted oral copulation with Grinsell, ruling that the charge was speculative and based on his actions with McKenna.[3] A panel of judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld his death sentence in 2006;[10] a request for a rehearing was rejected in November 2006.[11][12] The Supreme Court of the United States rejected Raley's final appeal in 2007.[13]
In 2013, Raley's lawyers stated their client was autistic and asked that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, citing Atkins v. Virginia, a 2002 Supreme Court case that called the execution of a criminal with intellectual disabilities cruel and unusual punishment.[14] Raley attempted to fire his lawyers for arguing that he was mentally retarded,[15] and the commutation request was rejected in September 2013.[16]
In December 2006, U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Fogel stayed all executions in California after his review of the lethal injection protocol and tour of the execution chamber in San Quentin determined the existing protocol was "deeply disturbing" and "broken," possibly violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.[17] Over the next five years, state officials constructed a new chamber and overhauled the execution procedure; Fogel inspected the chamber again in 2011 to determine if California is ready to resume executions. Raley is one of at least six inmates on death row who had exhausted their appeals by 2011.[18] The updated lethal injection method had not been reviewed when U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney ruled in 2014 that California's capital punishment law was unconstitutional because of the prolonged appeals process, effectively setting aside the death penalty indefinitely for Raley and more than a dozen other inmates on death row.[19] In late 2017, the state Supreme Court upheld Proposition 66, which allowed prison officials to finalize the execution procedures, in turn allowing the federal courts to review the revised protocols; Raley would be one of 18 inmates to receive an execution date.[20]
Diane Alexis Whipple was an American lacrosse player and college coach. She was killed in a dog attack in San Francisco on January 26, 2001. The dogs involved were two Presa Canarios. Paul Schneider, the dogs' owner, is a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood and is serving three life sentences in state prison. The dogs were looked after by Schneider's attorneys, Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, a husband and wife who lived in the same apartment building as Whipple. After the fatal attack, the state brought criminal charges against the attorneys. Noel, who was not present during the attack, was convicted of manslaughter. Knoller, who was present, was charged with implied-malice second-degree murder and convicted by the jury. Knoller's murder conviction, an unusual result for an unintended dog attack, was rejected by the trial judge but ultimately upheld. The case clarified the meaning of implied malice murder.
In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty throughout the country at the federal level, in 27 states, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, such as aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 20 states have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other seven, as well as the federal government, being subject to different types of moratoriums.
Capital punishment is a legal punishment under the criminal justice system of the United States federal government. It is the most serious punishment that could be imposed under federal law. The serious crimes that warrant this punishment include treason, espionage, murder, large-scale drug trafficking, or attempted murder of a witness, juror, or court officer in certain cases.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Before the moratorium, executions had been frozen by a federal court order since 2006, and the litigation resulting in the court order has been on hold since the promulgation of the moratorium. Thus, there will be a court-ordered moratorium on executions after the termination of Newsom's moratorium if capital punishment remains a legal penalty in California by then.
Capital punishment is one of two possible penalties for aggravated murder in the U.S. state of Oregon, with it being required by the Constitution of Oregon.
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Carolands Chateau is a 46,050-square-foot (4,278 m2), 4.5 floor, 98 room mansion on 5.83 acres (2.36 ha) in Hillsborough, California, United States. An example of American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts design, the building is a California Historical Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Carolands is one of the last of the houses built during the Gilded Age, a period of great mansion-building that included famous houses of the Vanderbilt family, such as Marble House, Biltmore Estate and The Breakers, and stately California houses such as Filoli and the Huntington family's mansions.
Clarence Ray Allen was an American criminal and proxy killer who was executed in 2006 at the age of 76 by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in California for the murders of three people. Allen was the second-oldest inmate at the time to be executed in the United States since 1976.
Gregory Reyes is an American businessman who most recently served as the chief executive officer (CEO) for Brocade Communications. He is the first person to have been convicted for fraudulent backdating of corporate stock options.
Luis José Monge was a convicted mass murderer who was executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary in 1967. Monge was the last inmate to be executed before an unofficial moratorium on execution that lasted for more than four years while most death penalty cases were on appeal, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, invalidating all existing death penalty statutes as written.
Albert Greenwood Brown Jr. is an American murderer and rapist who has been convicted of sexual molestation with force of a minor, two counts of first-degree rape with force, and the first degree murder of a teen girl in Riverside, California.
Thomas Martin Thompson was an American man who was executed in 1998 by the state of California for the 1981 killing of Ginger Fleischli. His execution was controversial; some believe him to have been innocent of the charges, while others thought Thompson's guilt was clear.
The State Correctional Institution – Phoenix is a state prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, with a Collegeville postal address, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Operated by Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, it was named after the phoenix bird.
Rodney Rodell Reed is an American death row inmate who was convicted on May 18, 1998, by a Bastrop County District Court jury for the April 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas.
Capital punishment remains a legal penalty for multiple crimes in The Gambia. However, the country has taken recent steps towards abolishing the death penalty.
Capital punishment in Malawi is a legal punishment for certain crimes. The country abolished the death penalty by a Malawian Supreme Court ruling in 2021, but it was soon reinstated. However, the country is currently under a death penalty moratorium, which has been in place since the latest execution in 1992.
Robert Lee Massie was an American convicted murderer who was executed by the state of California for the 1979 murder of a liquor store owner in San Francisco. Massie's case was notable because he had previously been sentenced to death for another murder he committed in 1965, but that death sentence was overturned following Furman v. Georgia. He was resentenced to life in prison and then paroled in 1978, committing the second murder months after his release. Following his death sentence for the 1979 murder, it was overturned by the Supreme Court of California because his lawyer had not consented to a guilty plea. He was sentenced to death a third and final time in 1989 and was executed in 2001 at San Quentin State Prison via lethal injection.
Thomas Eugene Creech is an American serial killer who was convicted of two murders committed in 1974 and sentenced to death in Idaho. The sentence was reduced two years later on appeal to life imprisonment. He was sent back to Idaho's death row for a 1981 murder committed while imprisoned. Creech personally confessed to a total of 42 murders in various states, some of which allegedly involved the Hells Angels and the Church of Satan. Most of his additional confessions are uncorroborated, but police believe strong evidence links Creech to seven additional murder victims. In January 2024, an investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department concluded that Creech murdered Daniel A. Walker.
David Esco Welch is an American mass murderer who shot and killed six people during a home invasion of his girlfriend's house in Oakland, California on December 8, 1986.
↑ Howard Mintz (December 1, 2006). "Death row appeal denied". San Jose Mercury News. Archived from the original on 9 November 2014. Retrieved 12 October 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
