The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to hear the case of a woman convicted of 60-year-old man’s beating death inside his motor home in Long Beach more than a decade ago.
Jazmin Montanez was retried and convicted again in 2022 of first-degree murder for the Jan. 27, 2014, bludgeoning of Thomas Taylor after a three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal overturned her conviction, finding in a 2019 ruling that the “cumulative effect of two critical errors compels reversal” of her conviction.
That panel — which had upheld co-defendant Anthony Josua Paz’s conviction for second-degree murder — found that his admissions during a jailhouse conversation were “wrongly admitted as evidence” against Montanez. The panel also found that the trial court did not instruct