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The Queen (aka "mrsmuir") SWBB
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Man’s mental condition, past cited in capital resentencing
Jun. 08, 2018
"RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A survivor from El Salvador’s civil war must be resentenced because North Carolina jurors who decided he should die for his wife’s killing weren’t told to consider evidence relating his conduct to his mental condition, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The justices vacated the death sentence but let stand the 2014 first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping convictions of Juan Carlos Rodriguez of Winston-Salem for the 2010 death of his wife, Maria. Her decapitated body was discovered three weeks after she was last seen alive.
The majority in the 5-2 decision determined that Superior Court Judge Stuart Albright failed during Rodriguez’s sentencing hearing to direct jurors to examine that Rodriguez’s mental limitations and past struggles impaired his ability to fully comprehend his conduct.
Associate Justice Sam Ervin IV, writing the majority opinion, pointed to evidence showing Rodriguez was malnourished and in extreme poverty amid constant violence as a child in war-torn El Salvador in the late 1970s and ’80s. He suffered a mental disorder, according to expert witnesses and had a low IQ and mild intellectual disability.
Jurors had to make a binding recommendation to the judge to sentence Rodriguez to death or to life in prison without parole. Ervin wrote there’s uncertainty whether the judge adding this information to the list of mitigating and aggravating circumstances would have changed a juror’s mind.
Evidence of Rodriguez’s “mental limitations and disturbed and overwrought thinking supports a rational inference that defendant’s ability to fully comprehend the wrongfulness of his conduct and to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law was adversely affected” when the murder occurred, Ervin wrote...."
Man's mental condition, past cited in capital resentencing
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