A decision on whether to seek a death penalty prosecution against the suspect in a series of stabbings in Davis may be months away, with prosecutors studying every available aspect of the background of Carlos Reales Dominguez.
“You go by the book,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said in an interview Friday in his Woodland office shortly after Reales Dominguez pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one of attempted murder.
Reisig would not discuss specifics of the Reales Dominguez case.
But he said his office follows a laborious procedure to determine the background of each suspect who may be eligible for a death penalty prosecution, including studying mitigating and aggravating circumstances in the person’s life, such as age, mental issues or abuse, or trauma.
“The death penalty is reserved for a very small case type, where you have premeditated first-degree murder with a special circumstance …” Reisig said. “And so that necessitates an extensive review of the person’s entire history of criminal conduct, and even conduct that wasn’t prosecuted, but was otherwise violent.”
“And that can be very labor intensive.”
In essence, Reisig said, investigators go back as far as possible to study a suspect’s background.
“In order to do the analysis, you have to actually look at the individual’s entire life,” he said. “And that’s what takes so long in these decisions…
“To make the decision on whether or not you’re going to seek the death penalty, you have to basically look at the person’s life from birth until now. And you look at, where did they grow up? What was going on in the home? Was there trauma? What was the family situation?
“Was there exposure to drugs, violence, that type of thing.”
Reisig said mitigating factors that could lead to a decision not to pursue a death penalty trial can include evidence of mental health issues, abuse as a child or even the suspect’s age.
“It’s a very deep dive,” he said. “We pull school records. You go all the way back to the earliest days that you can. Were they a good student? Were there problems?”
Investigators also study the facts of the crimes, which court filings in the Reales Dominguez case describe as involving “great violence” and “disclosing a high degree of cruelty, viciousness, or callousness.”
Reales Dominguez, 21, is accused of using a large hunting knife to repeatedly stab three people in Davis between April 26 and May 1, two of them fatally.
David Henry Breaux, 50, was found dead in Central Park on April 27 from numerous stab wounds. Court papers say he may have been killed the day before.
The second victim, Karim Abou Najm, 20, was a UC Davis student who was stabbed to death the night of April 29 in Sycamore Park, a half-mile from where Reales Dominguez lived in a rental home with roommates.
The third stabbing occurred just before midnight on May 1, when a woman living in a tent near Second and L streets was attacked by someone who slashed open the side of the tent and stabbed her repeatedly. Kimberlee Guillory survived the attack.
In charging Reales Dominguez, Reisig’s office alleged special circumstances “for multiple murders, in that Carlos Reales Dominguez murdered more than one person.”
Those charges make Reales Dominguez eligible for a sentence of life without parole or the death penalty, if convicted.
Davis police have said they do not believe Reales Dominguez, who was a biological sciences major at UC Davis until he was kicked out April 25 for unspecified academic reasons, has a prior criminal record.
Factors that could be used to decide whether to pursue a death penalty prosecution include other violent criminal activity by the suspect, whether the suspect was under extreme mental or emotional strain.
In a previous high-profile double, murder in Davis — the 2013 stabbing slayings of Claudia Maupin, 76, and Oliver Northup, 87, as the couple slept in their home — the death penalty did not come into play because Daniel Marsh, who was later convicted of the murders, was only 15 at the time.
Reisig, who has been district attorney for 17 years, said his office has pursued the death penalty only once while he has overseen the office. In the 2018 slaying of Yolo County sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz prosecutors convicted Marco Topete, who was sentenced to death.
During his time in office, Reisig said, prosecutors have analyzed dozens of cases that could qualify for a death penalty prosecution.
“I don’t make that decision in a bubble,” Reisig said. “We gather together our executive team, which is all of the most senior experienced prosecutors in the office, and we include our investigators who’ve conducted this investigation for us.
“And we go through the entire history. We go through all of these factors in aggravation and mitigation. We debate, we go back and forth. Sometimes this takes days of discussion…
“We debate it, we deliberate, and then a recommendation is made to me, and then I make the decision. I can say with certainty that as long as I’ve been the DA the decision has always been unanimous with my executive team.”
The fact that Gov. Gavin Newsom has suspended the use of the death penalty in California will not play a role in any decision, Reisig said.
“That was a unilateral move by the governor, which by the way, he had promised he wouldn’t do during his campaign,” Reisig said. “And I didn’t forget that.
“And the reality is that less than two years before that voters in California had ratified the death penalty, so it’s the law, it’s still on the books … it’s still here. And my job is to look at it and make a decision.
“So that’s what I’ll do.”
