LOS ANGELES (KNX) — A California state appeals court has ordered a new sentencing hearing for a young woman convicted of the beating death of a University of Southern California graduate student during a robbery near campus in 2014.
The three-judge panel sitting on the 2nd District Court of Appeal noted in its Monday ruling that a new hearing for defendant Alejandra Guerrero must be done in her presence. Her 2021 hearing was conducted without her in the courtroom, in which an L.A. County Superior Court judge refused to reduce her prison sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
Guerrero, now 23, was 16 at the time of the murder of Xinran Ji, a Chinese national studying electrical engineering at USC. The attack, which prosecutors said was carried out alongside Alberto Ochoa, 17 at the time, and Andrew Garcia, at the time, took place in July 2014. Ji died after being beaten with a wrench and a baseball bat.
A fourth defendant, Jonathan Del Carmen, had his conviction redesignated to one for attempted robbery. Del Carmen has previously pleaded no contest to second-degree murder for being the getaway driver in the attack on Ji.
The appellate court’s Monday ruling recalled that it had ordered the case against Guerrero to be sent back to the trial court in Sep. 2020 for resentencing to satisfy a statutory obligation to consider mitigating factors related to a perpetrator’s youth.
"The court overruled the objection of Guerrero's counsel that Guerrero had a right to be present at the hearing and, again, did not consider youth-related factors before imposing a sentence of life without parole," the panel found in its latest ruling. "In the interests of justice and to ensure Guerrero receives a fair and unbiased hearing, further proceedings in this matter are to be held before a trial judge other than the judge who previously presided over the case."
In that Sep. 2020 ruling, the same three-judge panel rejected Guerrero’s case that there was not enough evidence to support the jury’s special circumstance finding of murder while committing armed robbery.
The judges noted that Guerrero, who investigators said was armed with the wrench, got out of a car to confront Ji and violently hit him with the weapon after Ochoa hit the victim with a bat. Garcia also beat him on the head with the bat.
"The group left the scene as Ji lay covered in blood with a fractured skull," the judges wrote. "Ji managed to get up and return to his nearby apartment, where he died a short time later from his head wounds. The attack was captured on surveillance cameras and played for the jury."
It was only when Del Carmen pulled the car away that "Guerrero stopped her attack on Ji and returned to the car, not to go home or to call for help, but to commit additional robberies, again armed with a deadly weapon."
After the attack on Ji, the group drove to Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey. There, they encountered a man and a woman and demanded their possessions. The group was arrested soon thereafter.
Prosecutors told the jury the group targeted Ji because they thought he was an “easy target,” walking alone in the dark. Ji’s murder was the third involving Chinese nationals studying at USC in a decade.
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