An Orange County Superior Court jury has denied a twice-convicted child molester’s request to be released from a Coalinga mental-health hospital.
Sid Landau, now 85, asked to be released into the community without supervision, but the jury denied his request on Tuesday, April 9, after deliberating for about an hour, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
Landau, who lived in Anaheim at one point, was convicted in 1982, when he was sentenced to three years in state prison for molesting a 10-year-old Anaheim boy. He was released in 1984 before he pleaded guilty in 1988 to 18 counts of lewd acts with a 9-year-old boy and was sentenced to 17 years in state prison.
In 1996, Landau was paroled.
Over the years, Landau became a pariah and was chased from one temporary home to the next by protesters who waved signs and wore T-shirts that read “Get Rid of Sid.” He received hate mail and death threats, according to news accounts of the day, and television and newspaper photographers followed his daily movements.
During one stretch when he was out of custody he moved into Placentia, where police notified residents that the convicted child molester was living in their neighborhood using the then-new Megan’s Law. Protesters — wearing T-shirts that read, “Get Rid of Sid” and waiving signs — prompted Landau to move from temporary home to temporary home.
He violated his parole three times from 1996 to 2000, with an assault and battery, tampering with his GPS monitoring device, and unauthorized contact with children, the District Attorney’s Office said.
The DA’s Office filed charges in 2000 accusing Landau of being a sexually violent predator. After two hung juries, a third jury affirmed the status in 2006, and Landau was put back in custody and committed to a state mental-health hospital indefinitely.
“We have been fighting for decades to keep this sadistic predator behind bars because of the incredible danger he poses to children everywhere if he were to be released,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement. “We will do absolutely everything we can do to prevent one more child from being preyed on by this child molester, and that means making sure he never sets a foot outside of a state mental hospital until the day he dies.”
Landau refused treatment at the facility, the District Attorney’s Office said, and broke behavioral rules before petitioning in 2013 for unconditional release.
A jury rejected his request.
In 2016, a state appeals court panel reversed the jury decision, ruling that prosecutors made multiple errors, including presenting hearsay evidence from a forensic psychiatrist to the jury.
On Monday, though, the jury ruled that Landau still qualifies as a sexually violent predator, making him unfit for even conditional release.