After 3 1/2 days of deliberations, a jury on Monday recommended the death penalty for a man who acted as his own lawyer and who was earlier convicted of killing an Ocean Beach liquor store clerk and a University City mortgage broker in 2004.
The nine-woman, three-man jury recommended the ultimate penalty against Tecumseh Nehemiah Colbert, 24, during his retrial of the penalty phase. Colbert was convicted during his first trial in June 2007 of first-degree murder in connection with the death of Richard Hammes, 45, and Robert McCamey, 32, enhanced by special circumstances of murder during attempted robberies involving multiple victims.
Colbert was allowed to act as his own attorney in the retrial of the penalty phase after his first jury deadlocked 8-4 in favor of execution. A mistrial was declared in 2007.
On Monday, jurors affirmed their vote for the death penalty after Colbert asked the court clerk to poll each juror, which is a standard request by attorneys following a verdict.
After the jury convened, San Diego Superior Court Judge Michael Wellington asked Colbert, “Do you want to continue being your own attorney? I had the sense you wanted to be your own attorney to tell your story.”
Wellington suggested that Colbert use an attorney to file a motion with the judge to reduce the judgment to a life term in state prison without the possibility of parole. Colbert agreed and asked that his attorney advisor, Bradley Patton, who sat with him daily, be in charge of representing him.
Colbert had little reaction to the verdict, but several of his family members wept afterward in the hallway.
Sentencing was set for Sept. 8. All death penalty sentences are automatically appealed to the California Supreme Court. There are more than 650 men on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, and the average wait until execution is about 17 years.
The penalty phase retrial lasted a month. In closing arguments on June 27, the soft-spoken killer asked the jury to spare his life. Colbert told jurors about his troubled past and said his mother used drugs while she was pregnant ” behavior that he said caused him brain damage.
“I’m used to being handcuffed. The truth is I can’t be in society,” Colbert told jurors. “Two people have been killed. There’s nothing I can do to make up for that. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I don’t blame anyone. I take full responsibility for what has happened.”
Colbert said he became involved with gang members as a teenager and was sent to the “barbaric” California Youth Authority for his first offense of burglary. He said most inmates “fight for respect, and fear is power.”
He first went to an adult prison at age 19.
Deputy District Attorney Robert Amador described Colbert to jurors as “a self-centered, manipulative gang member … a cold-blooded killer.”
Hammes was filling in temporarily for a clerk at Prime Market Liquor, 4161 Voltaire St. in Ocean Beach, when Colbert, wearing a Halloween mask, demanded money on Nov. 10, 2004.
The store’s security footage showed Hammes walking toward the gunman without giving him any money.
Hammes was shot in the chest and died an hour later at a hospital. The store’s owner, Saad Ewdish, let Hammes live in a shed on the property because Hammes had been homeless. On that fateful day, Ewdish said he had to leave unexpectedly to care for an ill son who would have served as the clerk if Ewdish had not left Hammes in charge.
McCamey, of University City, was shot to death on Oct. 29, 2004, in the Bay Terraces area.
Colbert’s co-defendant, Theron Lee Peters, 41, pleaded guilty to both murders and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in state prison in June 2007, by Wellington.