REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — After nearly four months as an inmate in the San Mateo County Jail, Scott Peterson made a special request through his lawyers on Friday: Transfer me back to San Quentin.
The notorious prison on the edge of San Francisco Bay, where Peterson spent the past 17 years on death row, is generally not considered a preferred destination. But the state prison has something the county jail does not: looser restrictions on phone calls between lawyers and their clients.
“Can we have him back at San Quentin?” his Beverly Hills lawyer, Pat Harris, asked San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo.
Harris made the request in the midst of an evidentiary hearing where Peterson is attempting to convince the judge to overturn his 2004 murder conviction and grant him a new trial. Peterson’s lawyers and the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s office both rested their cases Friday, but their closing arguments won’t take place until June 29. The delay gives both sides time to file briefs and accommodate schedules.
Because Harris will be back at his Southern California office until the next hearing, he said he needs more frequent phone calls and Zoom meetings with Peterson that are more readily allowed at San Quentin. Although the county jail made it easy to see Peterson in person, Harris said, phone calls were restricted to the 30-minute a day time slot that Peterson is allowed outside time.
Peterson has been housed at the San Mateo County jail during the on-again, off-again evidentiary hearing and the judge ruled that he will be transferred back again before the June 29 hearing.
“This is an important time for you to have access to your client,” Massullo said at the end of the hearing Friday. “He’s to be transported back to San Quentin.”
Peterson was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to death in early 2005 for murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son. Peterson, who was having an affair, gave differing accounts to neighbors and police of where he was when Laci vanished from their Modesto home the morning of Christmas Eve 2002. He told them he was either golfing or fishing in the San Francisco Bay. The bodies of Laci and their unborn son washed up separately along the Richmond shoreline several months later.
Peterson, 49, has been serving a life sentence since December, when the California Supreme Court overturned his death sentence, ruling that potential jurors who personally opposed the death penalty but said they would follow the law were improperly excluded from the jury pool.
Peterson is now seeking to overturn his conviction by arguing that one of the jurors in his trial lied when she didn’t disclose that she had been involved in a pair of domestic violence episodes. Juror No. 7, Richelle Nice, testified that she didn’t mention them on a jury survey or during questions from lawyers because she did not consider herself a victim.
The original trial was moved from Stanislaus County to Redwood City in 2004 because of extensive pretrial publicity, but the trial became an international phenomenon nonetheless.
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