THE CONVICTION THAT HELD
John List remained in the New Jersey state prison system from his conviction in 1990 until his death in 2008.
He was not a prominent presence in the prison system. He was not, by the accounts that emerged from that period, a disruptive inmate. He was, as he had always been, a controlled, private person who kept to himself and did not draw attention. He reportedly continued to attend religious services in prison.
His appeal, decided in 1993, challenged the conviction on several grounds, including issues related to the admissibility of evidence and the conduct of the trial. The New Jersey appellate court upheld the conviction. The legal arguments he had available to him — after a trial conducted with full constitutional protections, with evidence that included his own fingerprints, the documented crime scene from 1971, and his own admission of identity — did not prevail.
The five consecutive life sentences were not a symbolic punishment. They were what the law provided. In the period between 1972, when New Jersey abolished capital punishment, and 1982, when it reinstated it (and 2007, when it abolished it again), the maximum punishment available for murder in New Jersey was life in prison. List’s crimes occurred in 1971, when capital punishment was still on the books in New Jersey, but the issue of whether he could be tried for a capital offense for crimes committed when the law allowed it, prosecuted after abolition, was resolved by the courts in ways that made the life sentences the operative outcome.
Five consecutive life terms. He was ineligible for parole for 125 years. He was convicted at sixty-four years of age.
John Emil List died on March 21, 2008, at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. He was eighty-two years old. The cause of death was complications from pneumonia.
He had been in prison for eighteen years when he died — roughly the same period of time that he had been free under the name Robert Clark.
No one came forward to claim his remains.