David Allen Raley

David Allen Raley (born November 9, 1961) is a convicted murderer and currently incarcerated at California State Prison, Sacramento. 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.

Crimes

Carolands, a mansion completed in 1914 for Harriet Pullman Carolan, had been vacant since the mid-1970s and was not open to the public.

Later that same Saturday, McKenna and Grinsell came to explore Carolands; they had heard stories from other students that unofficial tours were available. 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. until approximately 11 PM. His parents returned to the house after midnight; Raley told them he had cleaned the garage. Both Grinsell and McKenna identified Raley as their assailant.

Jury selection lasted approximately two months, and Raley's trial began in March 1987. 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.

The penalty phase trial jury deadlocked 7–5 in favor of the death penalty,

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. a request for a rehearing was rejected in November 2006. The Supreme Court of the United States rejected Raley's final appeal in 2007.

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. Raley attempted to fire his lawyers for arguing that he was intellectually disabled, and the commutation request was rejected in September 2013.

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. 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. 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. 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. His death sentence was later commuted to life without the possibility of parole.