Kevin Darnell Pearson, now 49, will remain on California's death row after the state Supreme Court unanimously rejected his appeal, affirming a death sentence tied to one of Los Angeles County's longest-running capital cases. Pearson was convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of Penny Keprta, a 43-year-old married mother of three who was kidnapped off a Long Beach sidewalk while walking to a store for her wheelchair-bound roommate. Nearly 28 years after her death, the ruling closes out one chapter of a case that has cycled through retrials, reversals, and shifting prosecutorial policy.
Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan authored the August ruling, finding that Pearson's own admissions of active participation in the attack provided overwhelming evidence supporting the death penalty, according to MyNewsLA. Pearson admitted to helping pull Keprta down as she tried to flee, helping strip her clothes, raping her while a companion held her down, and repeatedly kicking her in the head and face with steel-toed boots. He also admitted to helping throw her over a fence and leaving her nude body beside the freeway, then disposing of evidence afterward.
The attack unfolded the night of December 29, 1998, after Keprta, 5 feet 2 inches tall and 110 pounds, was kidnapped from a sidewalk around 11 p.m. and dragged into a dark area along the 405 Freeway. According to court records and medical examiner findings reported by the Los Angeles Times, the three attackers had first approached her while intoxicated, shouting “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” across the street, which she politely answered before the ambush began. The freeway noise reportedly kept anyone from hearing her screams as Pearson, over 6 feet tall and roughly 180 pounds, and his co-defendants outnumbered her three to one.
A Body Mistaken for a Mannequin
Caltrans workers found Keprta's nude body on a freeway embankment near Wardlow Road and Long Beach Boulevard, initially mistaking it for a mannequin, per the same Los Angeles Times account. She had been beaten to death with a wooden stake and robbed of just $6 worth of food stamps. The Times reported that she suffered 114 distinct injuries in total, including bite marks, partial removal of her right ear, roughly 90 external wounds, two dozen internal injuries, and at least 10 skull fractures inflicted before death.
Investigators matched Keprta's blood to Pearson's pants and steel-toe boots, and the outlet's report on court documents states Pearson boasted to a neighbor the day after the murder that “we killed a white woman.” Keprta, also legally named Penny Sigler in court filings, shared the exact birth date with her son Teddy, who was 14 when she was killed and later testified at Pearson's 2013 retrial about their bond. Teddy told the court he wakes up every day realizing he no longer has his mother, and said he believed Pearson should receive the full punishment.
Why a Second Trial Happened at All
Pearson's case reached the Supreme Court twice because his original 2003 death sentence was reversed in 2012. Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote the unanimous opinion finding that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Tomson T. Ong had improperly dismissed a prospective juror solely for expressing ambivalent views on capital punishment, a violation of state law that forbids removing jurors with equivocal death-penalty views if they can still fulfill their oath, according to the Metropolitan News-Enterprise. Ong had said the weight of the evidence supported the jury's original death verdict, but the flawed juror exclusion forced a new penalty-phase trial. A second jury again recommended death for Pearson in 2012.
Pearson was convicted alongside two co-defendants, Warren Justin Hardy and Jamelle Edward Armstrong, whose cases have taken sharply different paths through the same court. In May 2018, the state Supreme Court upheld Hardy's death sentence in a 6-1 decision, with Justice Goodwin Liu dissenting over the prosecution's strikes against Black prospective jurors, as detailed by the Long Beach Post. Hardy, also 49, remains on death row alongside Pearson.
One Co-Defendant, a Different Outcome
Armstrong's case broke the other way. In February 2019, the court overturned his death sentence in a 4-3 decision after finding the trial court had erroneously excluded at least four prospective jurors, with Liu again dissenting to argue that removing all potential Black jurors raised serious concerns of racial bias in a case involving a Black defendant and a white victim, the Long Beach Post reported. Armstrong, now 46, was ultimately resentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 2021, a move enabled by then-District Attorney George Gascón's 2020 directive advising that death was never an appropriate resolution in any case.
Prosecutor Laura Laesecke argued that Armstrong had already benefited from Gascón's directive and that the maximum possible sentence was still warranted against him, per the Long Beach Post's account. But that directive no longer governs how Los Angeles County prosecutors approach capital cases. In March 2025, District Attorney Nathan Hochman reversed Gascón's Special Directive 20-11, ending the blanket ban on prosecutors seeking or defending death sentences in the county.
A Sentence Without an Execution Date
Even with Pearson's death sentence now fully affirmed, the practical outcome remains largely symbolic. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-09-19 in March 2019, placing a moratorium on executions statewide, dismantling San Quentin's execution chamber and withdrawing California's lethal injection protocols, according to a statement from the Office of Governor Gavin Newsom. California last carried out an execution in 2006. Unless that moratorium is lifted, Pearson and Hardy will continue serving their sentences on death row without any scheduled path to execution, even as the courts continue to affirm the sentences themselves.
