SAN FRANCISCO (Court TV) — Attorneys for convicted killer Scott Peterson are pledging to file another appeal after their latest petition was shut down by a California appeals court.
Scott Peterson appears at a status hearing on March 12, 2024 via Zoom from Mule Creek State Prison in California. (Court TV)
Scott Peterson, 53, was convicted of murder in the deaths of his wife, Laci Peterson, 27, and their unborn son, Conner. Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she disappeared on Christmas Eve in 2002; their bodies weren’t discovered for months, until April 2003. Conner’s body was found by people walking their dog in a park; the next day, a human torso was found approximately one mile away.
Scott Peterson maintained his innocence after his arrest and at trial; he was convicted and initially sentenced to death. That death sentence was overturned by the California Supreme Court in 2020 after finding that the penalty was unconstitutional for procedural reasons. He is now serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
The Los Angeles Innocence Project (LAIP) has taken on Scott Peterson’s case and said it was disappointed in a judge’s decision to dismiss the latest appeal. “The ruling demonstrates a profound misunderstanding and misapplication of the law applied to habeas corpus petitions,” LAIP’s deputy director, Hannah Brown, said in a statement.
MORE | Petition: New evidence ‘eviscerates’ case against Scott Peterson
The most recent appeal in Scott Peterson’s case, filed in 2025, listed evidence it claimed both exonerated the defendant and eviscerated the prosecution’s case. That evidence included a doctor who claimed that the science used at the time of Scott Peterson’s trial was faulty and showed an inaccurate date of death for Conner.
Laci Peterson is seen in an undated photo. (Missing Poster)
At Scott Peterson’s trial, prosecution expert Dr. Greggory DeVore testified that Conner’s gestational age was exactly 33 weeks and 1 day when he died, which would have made the date of his death Dec. 23, 2002. DeVore relied on ultrasound technology and research from 1984 in drawing those conclusions. Scott Peterson’s own attorneys conceded that “If Laci was killed on December 23, Petitioner is the only person who could have reasonably killed her because they were at home alone together that night.” Now, the brief asserts, new technology shows that Conner was likely killed sometime between Dec. 28, 2002, and January 5, 2003. “This new scientific evidence is alone sufficient grounds for overturning the conviction in this case, because it shows that the jury relied on false and unreliable scientific evidence to convict Petitioner, violating his right to due process, and lays bare the falsity of the other circumstantial evidence the jury relied on to convict him.”
In her order denying the petition, filed on Monday, Judge Elizabeth Hill found that the science was not, in fact, new and had already been presented by Scott Peterson’s defense attorneys in a 2015 petition seeking a new trial. Hill noted that the doctor cited by the defense in its 2015 petition, who reached the same conclusion that Conner’s date of death was closer to January, said that “he would have been able to testify to all of these facts at the time of trial, but he was not contacted by either the People or Petitioner prior to trial.”
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** FILE ** The Modesto, Calif., home of Laci and Scott Peterson is seen Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Because Hill found that none of the evidence presented in the brief was actually “new,” she held that all of the defense’s claims were procedurally barred under California law.
“Habeas corpus proceedings are extremely complex, and the law of habeas is often misunderstood by superior court judges who review those cases,” LAIP director Paula Mitchell said. “In the court’s ruling, strong exculpatory evidence was disregarded as ‘inadmissible,’ which is not the correct legal standard.”
While LAIP is filing an appeal of Hill’s decision to a higher court, Scott Peterson has a separate appeal pending in the California Supreme Court alleging juror misconduct. In that appeal, the defense alleged that a juror provided false answers on her juror questionnaire. “The LAIP is undeterred and will continue to fight for Mr. Peterson’s innocence,” Brown said.
