Killer's death penalty tossed

A man convicted in one of Sonoma County's more notorious crimes has been spared the death penalty after 27 years on Death Row.

On Wednesday, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed in court that a man convicted of a 1980 rape, stabbing and shooting involving three women at a Healdsburg ranch is legally mentally retarded and therefore exempt from capital punishment.

A jury sentenced Calvin Coleman Jr., now 50, to death in 1981. It was just the third such verdict in the county in the preceding 50 years and the first since 1954. It has happened seven times since.

Attorneys for Coleman petitioned for a review of his sentence after a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared state laws allowing the mentally retarded to be executed amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

California modified its laws in in 2005 to conform to the ruling, defining retardation not by a strict IQ standard, but as "significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning" accompanied by "deficits in adaptive behavior" that began before age 18.

After months of gathering records and testing Coleman at San Quentin prison's Death Row, mental health experts for both sides concluded Coleman met the new definition. The attorneys submitted an agreement to that effect Wednesday to Superior Court Judge René Chouteau.

Coleman will be returned to Sonoma County to be resentenced in October. The law mandates his new sentence be life without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutor Rob LaForge said the prosecution's forensic psychologist recently tested Coleman over two days at San Quentin, and he concurred with defense experts who'd previously concluded Coleman was mentally deficient.

He said his office gathered thousands of documents "essentially going back to the birth of Mr. Coleman until now" to explore his mental status.

"It was determined he meets the clinical and statutory definition of mental retardation," LaForge said.

One of Coleman's attorneys, Michael Charlson of San Francisco, said Coleman's case is the first in California brought under the Supreme Court ruling to have settled with agreement on both sides. Several others have been rejected and others are pending, he said.

"I give credit to the District Attorney's Office here," Charlson said. "They did their own testing and reached a conclusion consistent with what we contended. They did the right thing when the facts became known."

District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua said Wednesday said the findings of the prosecution's expert were clear.

"We did what we felt was right. We went to the court and asked to set aside the death penalty," he said. "It's a shame that it has taken 28 years to get to this point, but no one could have anticipated the Supreme Court ruling that came 22 years later," he said.

Coleman was convicted in 1981 of attacking three women at a Healdsburg-area home in May 1980, stabbing two of them, raping one and fatally shooting another.

The crimes occurred just five days after Coleman, then 22, was paroled from prison after serving 3½ years for rape and robbery in his native San Francisco.

Coleman had an increasingly violent criminal record that dated to age 12, court records show. He also had a history of mental deficits, first noted in court records at age 13, said another of his attorneys, Matthew Narensky of San Francisco.

A federal judge sent the case back to Sonoma County in 2006 after Coleman's appeals were given new life by the high court's 2002 ruling that said state laws that allowed the mentally retarded to be executed violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Coleman's mental health problems arose in Sonoma County in 1980 before he even entered pleas to the murder, rape and assault charges. Then, his defense attorney said there were indications Coleman suffered brain damage in a car crash in 1971 and from an alleged strike on the head from a counselor at a California Youth Authority facility.

Charlson said the depth of Coleman's cognitive deficits wasn't fully explored at trial.

According to his petition, Coleman's IQ has been tested several times, including as early as age 13. He scored in the mid-60s then and as high as 72 as an adult.

Mental retardation is generally thought to be present if an individual has an IQ test score of approximately 70 or below, according to the American Association on Mental Retardation. IQ scores can fluctuate throughout one's life for a variety of reasons.

At Coleman's sentencing in 1981, a psychologist testifying for the prosecution said prison IQ tests from 1978 showed Coleman to have slightly below-normal intelligence and a second-grade reading level. An earlier IQ test administered by the Youth Authority said he was a "borderline mental defective." A defense psychiatrist described Coleman as "practically mentally retarded."

After his release from prison in 1980, news reports said, Coleman returned to the Chalk Hill Road boys' ranch where he was sent for a few weeks in 1973 as a ward of the court.

He went to the house next door, ostensibly looking for work. He persuaded a 19-year-old girl who was working at the house to give him a glass of water and then raped and later stabbed her, according to testimony at trial.

The woman testified that Coleman fired a shotgun toward her, not knowing if it was loaded, saying, "I'm going to shoot you. If it's loaded, too bad. If not, you'll be OK."

When the two female property owners arrived an hour later, investigators say, Coleman shot Patricia Neidig, 54, in the face and neck as she walked in the door. He claimed it was an accident and the gun fired when the 19-year-old tried to wrestle it away from him.

Neidig died at the scene. Coleman then stabbed the younger woman at least twice, according to testimony.

The commotion brought the other resident, Jean Prendergast, then 62, inside the house. Coleman stabbed her, according to testimony.

Coleman retrieved a jacket he had removed and drove off in the 19-year-old's car, crashing not too far away. He was arrested two hours later with jewelry and money belonging to the victims in his pockets.

Prendergast died in 1998. The younger woman still resides in Sonoma County.

Coleman has been housed with about 650 other Death Row inmates at San Quentin. He still has family in the greater Bay Area, Narensky said.

"I'm delighted for my client," said Charlson, a civil attorney whose firm was appointed to the case by a federal judge. "Whatever a person's view on the death penalty, I don't think anyone would dispute that it needs to be administered in fair way."

Seven other men have been sentenced to death for murders committed in Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties since California restored the death penalty in 1978. None has been scheduled for execution.

The last death sentence recommended by a Sonoma County jury was for Robert Walter Scully Jr., who was convicted of killing Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy Frank Trejo with a sawed-off shotgun in 1995.

Staff Writer L.A. Carter can be reached at 568-5312 and lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com.