Joseph (JJ) Nuccio

Jody Lynn Zunino was brutally murdered on September 26, 2001. She was a sex worker who had been picked up by a customer in Stockton the night before. Her body was found unclothed and mutilated in a nearby field the next day.

On October 11, 2006, Mr. Nuccio was charged with this killing. An eyewitness had seen the victim get into a vehicle described as a white Bronco with tinted windows. The day after the murder, a peace officer saw a Ford Bronco in the area Jody had last been spotted, was registered to Terry Sprinkle, a parolee with a history of violence, who knew Jody from high school. Sprinkle’s Bronco was searched, and large splotches of red substance were photographed, although police inexplicably labelled them as “soda” without testing them.

The material evidence from the murder weapon that would point to the actual murderer, and exonerate Mr. Nuccio, has been mysteriously missing since 2007 -- the year he was tried in a cold case prosecution. Since his post-conviction discovery, he has been repeatedly prevented from getting access to the original DNA evidence from the murder scene despite his legal right to the evidence.

With the help of a forensic expert, the People’s Commission uncovered evidence that DNA testing of material taken from the body and murder weapon was conducted in 2001. The State has repeatedly failed to turn over this report, despite discovery requests and subpoenas.

The report constitutes new evidence of Mr. Nuccio’s innocence, and is part of a repeated pattern of burying the evidence in this case that implicates another person. This is all included in the petition currently pending before the Court of Appeals.

In 2023, Mr. Nuccio could not find a judge willing to oversee his petition. The case was then assigned to a visiting judge, who had over 2 decades of experience as a judge and 2 decades of experience as a prosecutor. After a week reviewing the case, he recused himself by email. Left without a judge, Mr. Nuccio requested an emergency change of court. The court denied this request, and assigned a different visiting judge, who denied all requests for further review, and then the petition itself.