LOS ANGELES—A state appellate court panel Dec. 31 rejected a re-sentencing bid by one of two men convicted of murdering two University of Southern California (USC) graduate students from China during a robbery more than a decade ago.

A three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge’s May 2023 decision in the case of Javier Bolden, who is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the April 11, 2012, attack on Ying Wu and Ming Qu.

The two victims were shot to death as they sat in a BMW that was double-parked on a street near the USC campus.

Bolden, now 32, petitioned for re-sentencing as a result of a recent change in state law affecting defendants in some murder cases.

But now-retired Judge Stephen Marcus concluded that the defendant could still be convicted of murder under current law because the evidence established that he was a major participant in the murders who acted with reckless indifference to human life and that he was a direct aider and abettor of the murders, according to the appellate court panel’s five-page ruling.

Co-defendant Bryan Barnes—who was described in the ruling as the gunman who shot and killed the two—pleaded guilty to a pair of first-degree murder counts and admitted that he used a firearm during the crime. Barnes, now 32, is also serving a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole.

Barnes has not appealed his conviction or sentence.

In 2016, a state appellate court panel rejected an earlier appeal from Bolden.

The defense contended then that jurors should not have heard Bolden’s statements to police incriminating himself in the crime or his jailhouse statements to a confidential informant about the killing and a February 2012 shooting.

“Bolden freely and without hesitation bragged to the informant about what had occurred in both shooting incidents and details about his own participation,” the appellate court panel found in its 2016 ruling.

The justices noted that “overwhelming evidence” supports Bolden’s first-degree murder conviction for the killings of Wu and Qu, adding that he was “convicted as an accomplice to the actual murderer.”

Deputy District Attorney Dan Akemon told jurors that Barnes fired two shots inside the car in which Wu and Qu were sitting and that Bolden told Barnes to “get what you can get” as the victims were dying in front of him.

Jurors found true the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders and murders during the commission of a robbery.

Along with the killings, Bolden was convicted of attempted murder for a Feb. 12, 2012, shooting about three miles away, in which a man suffered permanent brain damage, along with assault with a semi-automatic firearm on a woman who was shot in the leg by a stray bullet during that attack.

At Bolden’s sentencing, the judge said he showed “no remorse” during the trial and asked him, “How could you be gleeful about the nightmare you have caused?”