Scott Peterson returns to court to fight 2004 murder conviction with help of Los Angeles Innocence Project

By Carlos Castaneda

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    SAN MATEO COUNTY, California (KPIX) — Convicted killer Scott Peterson was scheduled to appear in a San Mateo County courtroom Tuesday morning as he fights to overturn his 2004 conviction for the murders of his pregnant wife and their unborn son.

Peterson was set to attend Tuesday morning’s status conference hearing remotely, while his counsel was expected to attend the proceedings in person.

The Los Angeles Innocence Project took up Peterson’s case in January, filing a motion for DNA testing to clear Peterson possibly. The same group recently used DNA evidence to overturn the murder conviction of Maurice Hastings, who spent nearly four decades in prison before he was declared factually innocent earlier this month.

Although the case is originally from Stanislaus County and is being prosecuted by the county’s District Attorney’s Office, the San Mateo County Superior Court in Redwood City is serving as the venue for Tuesday’s hearing as it was during the original trial.

Peterson was convicted in November 2004 of the first-degree murder of Laci Peterson, 27, and second-degree murder of the unborn son they were going to name Conner, dumping them into San Francisco Bay on Christmas Eve 2002. Their bodies were found months after they were reported missing from their home in Modesto. The judge moved the case to San Mateo County because of the concern people in Stanislaus County had made up their minds about Peterson’s guilt.

He was sentenced to death in March 2005.

Peterson admitted he was fishing on the day his wife disappeared but during the trial, he could not explain what type of fish he was trying to catch that day. Peterson had also sold his wife’s car, researched selling their house, and turned the baby nursery into a storage room in the weeks after Laci disappeared.

Peterson was arrested shortly after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wife’s death and that he had told her his wife was dead.

The California Supreme Court in 2020 overturned Peterson’s death sentence after finding that potential jurors were improperly dismissed after saying they disagreed with the death penalty but would follow the law and impose it.

In 2021, Peterson was resentenced to life in prison without parole under the glaring eyes of Laci Peterson’s family. Peterson was moved from San Quentin State Prison, now known as San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, to Mule Creek State Prison east of Sacramento in 2022.

Later that year, a judge denied Peterson’s plea for a new trial, ruling that a former juror was not guilty of misconduct during the trial.

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