A bill is headed to the governor’s desk that would drastically curtail cases in which a convicted murderer could be sentenced to death in Oregon.
Much confusion surrounds Senate Bill 1013 and the effect it would have on defendants accused of heinous crimes. Because of last-minute wording tacked onto the legislation before lawmakers approved it late last month, many Oregonians -- including some in the legal community -- aren’t aware of who will be eligible for the death penalty under the new law.
Ineligible defendants include Jeremy Christian, who is accused of fatally stabbing two strangers with a knife to their necks on a Portland MAX train and is scheduled to go to trial in January. Multnomah County prosecutors haven’t said whether they’ll push for a death sentence, but the new law would take that option off the table.
Also in Multnomah County, Homer Lee Jackson would become ineligible for the death penalty under the new law. Jackson is accused of the prostitution-related serial killings of four African-American women in the 1980s and 1990s in Portland after sexually assaulting them, strangling them and dumping their bodies. Police arrested Jackson in 2015 for the cold-case killings, and he is scheduled to go to trial next January.
But the subject of much debate in the legal community is whether Senate Bill 1013 would apply to crimes that were committed in the past, but for which defendants haven’t yet been sentenced.
That has left up in the air the future of defendants such as Angela McAnulty, a Eugene woman who became Oregon’s only female death row inmate when she was sentenced for the torture-starvation death of her 15-year-old daughter. A judge last month issued a draft opinion reversing McAnulty’s 2011 conviction and sentence, and granting her a new trial.
Also up in the air is the fate of Billy Lee Oatney, a death-row inmate who won a reversal in 2015 and is headed into a new trial in Washington County next January under charges that he killed a 34-year-old woman who had hired him to make her wedding jewelry in 1996. Susi Larsen’s funeral was held on what would have been her wedding day.
Senate Bill 1013 clearly states that it applies to past cases in which defendants haven’t yet been sentenced. That will bolster defense attorneys’ arguments that the death penalty doesn’t apply to McAnulty and Oatney, if they’re convicted again.
But Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, told The Oregonian/OregonLive Friday that an unrelated bill, Senate Bill 1005, states that Senate Bill 1013 doesn’t apply to defendants who’ve previously been sentenced but have been granted reversals. Williamson said those defendants include McAnulty and Oatney. Williamson said lawmakers wanted their intent to be clear so they added the language, on the advice of legislative lawyers, after Senate Bill 1013 has already passed both houses but Senate Bill 1005 had not yet passed.
A legal battle over which defendants the bill applies to could be brewing.
During a legislative hearing in April, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, told fellow lawmakers that the new legislation is intended to restrict the use of death sentences to “very, very rare cases.”
“It’s a good way to move away from what’s a very expensive model, one that essentially ... puts people on death row and then has nothing else happening to them except spending a lot of money on appeals,” Greenlick said.
Aliza Kaplan, a Lewis & Clark College law school professor and director of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, said two-thirds of people sentenced to death in the past 35 years had won reversals. The appeals system, which can last decades for each defendant and can result in multiple retrials, consumes millions of dollars of taxpayer money each year.
“These reversals are costing a ridiculous amount of money, and are a serious indication of how broken our system is,” Kaplan said.
The bill’s backers note that only two inmates have been executed since Oregonians re-instated capital punishment in 1984 -- and both volunteered to be killed in the 1990s by giving up on the appeals process. Thirty people are on death row today, but executions have been put on hold since then-Gov. John Kitzhaber instituted a moratorium in 2011. Gov. Kate Brown extended it during her tenure.
The bill narrows the definition of aggravated murder, which is the only crime in Oregon that can draw a death sentence. In order to be convicted of that crime, a defendant must have killed two or more people as an act of organized terrorism; killed a child younger than 14; killed another person while locked up in jail or prison for a previous murder; or killed a police, correctional or probation officer.
No longer will defendants be eligible for death under a list of other circumstances, including: killing two or more people at once; hiring someone else to murder for them; killing in the act of torturing or maiming a victim; or killing a victim in order to cover up another crime. Those who kill under those circumstances could be prosecuted under the new crime of first-degree murder, which for an adult could result in a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of release.
An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that of the 30 inmates currently on death row, as many as seven would be eligible for the death penalty -- if they’d committed their crimes under modern-day laws, including the new criteria in Senate Bill 1013. Those inmates include Bruce and Joshua Turnidge -- the father and son convicted of killing two police officers in the 2008 bombing of a Woodburn bank -- and several inmates who murdered children ages 2 to 13.
Lawmakers don’t have the power to outright repeal capital punishment. That would require voter approval.
Josh Marquis, who retired after 25 years as Clatsop County District Attorney in December, has closely followed the death penalty. He described the bill as a “craven attempt” to effectively abolish the death penalty.
“The honest thing to have done would have been to refer this back to the voters,” Marquis said. He thinks that hasn’t happened because death penalty opponents know it would fail.
The bill, if signed, won’t be retroactive: It won’t convert the sentences of Oregon’s current death row inmates.
The governor hasn't said if she'll sign the bill. But her spokeswoman Kate Kondayen said Brown "has been quite public about her opposition to the death penalty and plans to continue the moratorium."
-- Aimee Green
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