REDWOOD CITY — Lawyers for a small legal-defense team that has launched a Hail Mary bid to uncover new evidence in the gruesome case of notorious double murderer Scott Peterson — whose wife Laci and unborn child were found dead on the shores of San Francisco Bay — are seeking materials from police investigations they say were improperly withheld during Peterson’s trial.
“Mr. Peterson’s been waiting for 20 years for police reports and audio recordings and video recordings that should have been provided,” Paula Mitchell, lawyer and executive director for the Los Angeles Innocence Project said at a court hearing in Redwood City on Tuesday. “We are eager to get our investigation underway.”
Peterson, wearing a blue work shirt and with his dark hair pulled back into a short ponytail, appeared on a courtroom screen via a video link from a room at Mule Creek State Prison east of Sacramento. After a glitch saw him muted so he could be seen speaking but could not be heard, Peterson, now 51, answered briefly and politely when occasionally questioned by Judge Elizabeth Hill. Asked by the judge if he consented to appearing via Zoom, Peterson responded, “Absolutely. Thank you, your honor.”
Peterson was originally handed a death sentence over the Christmas Eve 2002 killings of his 27-year-old wife and the son she had carried for nearly eight months and planned to name Conner. The case, involving a handsome defendant, his dimpled substitute-teacher wife, and a mistress who started taping Peterson’s phone calls and talking to police after she found out Laci was missing, attracted worldwide attention.
Nearly two dozen journalists attended Tuesday’s hearing in San Mateo County Superior Court, where a thicket of TV cameras was set up outside the courtroom.
Mitchell’s group last month filed motions seeking the purported missing evidence, and asking for a court order for DNA testing on items they claim are related to the case. The Los Angeles Innocence Project, a nonprofit whose most recent charity filing with the IRS in 2022 showed a $350,000 annual budget and six employees, has said it is investigating Peterson’s “claim of actual innocence.”
Mitchell declined to speak to news media before or after the half-hour hearing. “We’ll let our case play out in court,” she said when asked why her group took Peterson’s case.
In 2020, the California Supreme Court overturned Peterson’s death sentence, and two years later Peterson was finally moved from San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco to Mule Creek State Prison. His life sentence carries no possibility of parole.
Soon after he was transferred to Mule Creek, Peterson lost a years-long quest for a new trial, after unsuccessfully arguing that a juror’s experience of domestic violence had biased her against him.
No forensic evidence tied Peterson to the murders of Laci and the child. On Dec. 24, 2002, Peterson had reported his wife missing from Modesto where the couple lived.
In mid-April 2003, the bodies of Laci and her son washed up separately along the edge of the Bay, within a mile of where Peterson told police he motored from the Berkeley Marina to go fishing on Christmas Eve day.
Prosecutors argued that Peterson, having an affair with a Fresno massage therapist, killed Laci, took her body out in his newly bought fishing boat and dumped her in the Bay, weighted with cement.
Peterson’s lawyers had argued that strangers abducted Laci Peterson while she walked the couple’s dog.
Peterson’s appearance Tuesday in a case-status conference arose from the group’s court filings seeking information about the investigation, and DNA testing of potential evidence, Reuters reported last month.
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Innocence Project is representing Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife and unborn child
The group’s lawyers are looking into a burglary at a house across the street, around the time of Laci’s disappearance, and suggest in court filings that she may have witnessed the crime and been taken by the burglars, according to Reuters. The L.A. Innocence Project is asking the court to order DNA testing on materials connected to the burglary, and on tarps and a large plastic bag found on the shore near the bodies of Laci and her son, Reuters reported.
The national Innocence Project has distanced itself from the Los Angeles group, saying in a press release issued after the court filings that the Southern California nonprofit was “wholly independent of the Innocence Project.”
Hill set three separate hearings on the case in San Mateo County Superior Court, with Peterson saying he would attend each by Zoom. Mitchell asked that the hearing on her team’s request for DNA testing be held before the hearing on investigative materials, “so if there is going to be testing ordered we can get that started.”
That DNA hearing was set for May 29. A hearing for the request from Mitchell’s team to seal court records was scheduled for April 16, with the group’s request for investigative materials was set to be heard July 15.