The reasons for the plea agreement, as stated by the prosecutors, included the ages and health of the surviving victims and key witnesses, the deaths of individuals who would have been witnesses, and the scale of the case — a discovery set of 1.3 million pages and a realistic projection that a trial could have taken as many as ten years. The six county district attorney offices that had been coordinating the prosecution consulted with victims and families before accepting the plea.
DeAngelo sat in a wheelchair during the June 29 hearing, appearing frail. Prosecutors later released jail surveillance footage showing him walking normally and exercising, suggesting that his courtroom appearance was inconsistent with his actual physical condition. The detail was noted in coverage because it spoke to the question of how DeAngelo was presenting himself in a legal context versus how he appeared in private.
The guilty plea produced a specific legal record: twenty-six counts of conviction, plus the extensive admissions concerning uncharged crimes. The guilty plea also established, as a legal matter, his responsibility for the documented deaths. It did not constitute a confession in the colloquial sense, and DeAngelo did not provide a detailed account of his crimes in the way that some defendants do at plea hearings. The legal record of the crimes is the plea itself and the case file, not an extended personal narrative.
The Sentencing
The sentencing hearings began on August 17, 2020, with four days of victim impact statements. More than fifty victims, family members, and others affected by the crimes addressed the court. The statements varied in character: some were focused on grief, some on anger, some on what the years of uncertainty had cost, some on what it meant to have reached a legal resolution after so long.