29 June 2018 :

District Judge Michael Villani vacated the death penalty for Frederick Mendoza, a Vietnam War veteran who raped and killed a 68-year-old woman more than 10 years ago. Mendoza, now 71, Hispanic, pleaded guilty in 2008 in the March 2007 slaying of Rita Kremberg. Under a deal with prosecutors made this month, Mendoza agreed that he would waive any challenge to his conviction and not appeal a sentence of life without parole. Mendoza had post-traumatic stress disorder after serving more than 18 months as a Marine in Vietnam, said his lawyer, Jamie Resch, who called the jury's sentence "fundamentally unreliable." Prosecutors told jurors who decided Mendoza's penalty that he had a prior conviction for a sexual crime in Las Vegas.