Jury selection starts in second death penalty trial for admitted Sacramento cop killer
Prosecutors have launched their second attempt to win a death penalty sentence against Adel Ramos, who last summer pleaded guilty to killing Sacramento police rookie Tara O’Sullivan in a chaotic 2019 ambush shooting that rocked the Sacramento region.
The new jury selection and penalty trial comes just months after a Sacramento County jury in 2024 said it was hopelessly deadlocked on whether Ramos, 51, should be put to death for O’Sullivan’s murder after a single juror held the harshest penalty at bay by refusing to support it.
California has not carried out an execution since 2006 but the death penalty remains on the books, and prosecutors continue to seek capital punishment in expensive trials that add millions to the cost of adjudicating murder cases.
So many prisoners have been sentenced to death in California — and so few have actually been executed — that the ranks of condemned inmates in the state have swelled to more than 600. The system is so short of cash and so bogged down with prisoners that it can take 30 years or more for inmates to be assigned a lawyer for key appeals that are guaranteed to them by law.
To seek the death penalty, courts in California must hold a separate trial from the one that decides guilt or innocence. In Ramos’ case, there was no prior murder trial because he pleaded guilty. But a sentencing trial was held last fall.
After that jury deadlocked in November, Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho said his office would seek capital punishment again, in a second trial. Jury selection for that proceeding was scheduled to begin Monday, and opening arguments were expected to begin next month, court records showed.
A jury must be unanimous to impose the death penalty. If it is deadlocked, a judge can impose a lesser penalty.
Ramos pleaded guilty on Aug. 30 to felony counts including murder with special circumstances for O’Sullivan’s slaying and attempted murder of another officer at the violent, bloody scene in Del Paso Heights.
O’Sullivan, 26, who had graduated six months earlier from the Sacramento Police Department’s academy, was showered with bullets by Ramos on June 19, 2019, as she attempted to help a woman retrieve her belongings from a home where he had been behaving erratically. She was mortally wounded and lay on the ground nearly an hour before tactical officers were able to secure her rescue.
After an hourslong standoff, Ramos surrendered.
The first penalty trial featured agonizing testimony from O’Sullivan’s parents, friends and family, and took jurors through the details of the bloody scene in Del Paso Heights with videos, maps, photos and statements from other officers who had been at the scene.
It was so traumatic that after it was over, Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey Hightower, who argued the prosecution’s case, urged jurors to see a therapist.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in 2019, just a few months before O’Sullivan’s murder, and both the death row and the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison have been dismantled. At least one district attorney, Jeff Rosen of Santa Clara County, has said he will no longer seek capital punishment, citing ethical concerns as well as the high cost of prosecuting such cases in a state where inmates are more likely to die of old age in prison than face execution.
But experts say a future governor could reinstate executions, opening the possibility that some of the condemned inmates could indeed face being put to death.
This story was originally published February 24, 2025 at 1:37 PM.
