Marc Klaas stands for a portrait outside Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose, California, on May 31, 2024.
Nic Coury/AP/File
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On a summer day in 1996, Marc Klaas sat in a San Jose courtroom and clutched the hands of his family as a clerk read aloud the guilty verdict that would eventually place his 12-year-old daughter Polly’s killer on death row. When the man who had fatally strangled Polly Klaas after kidnapping her from a sleepover, Richard Allen Davis, learned of his fate, he turned to the courtroom with his shirt hanging out of his belt, and made an obscene gesture to the room.