Capital punishment may be gone for good in Idaho

Is the death penalty a thing of the past inthe Gem State? Sure looks that way. Ada County Prosecutor Greg Bower's recent decision not to seek the death penalty against the mother and her boyfriend accused of killing 8-year-old Robert Manwill last summer shows just how difficult prosecutors believe it is to convince a jury to put a convicted person to death in Idaho.

And there are other considerations as well. Recession-battered small counties simply can't afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars that prosecuting a death penalty case requires.

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries - not judges - must impose capital punishment. For prosecutors, that's a much bigger hurdle.

To apply the death penalty, jurors must unanimously find that the aggravating factors - such as whether the defendant showed an utter disregard for human life or a propensity to commit murder - outweigh mitigating factors offered by the defense.

Mitigation is a murky concept. Defense attorneys can offer evidence of whatever they say may have contributed to what happened. Common mitigating factors include mental health issues or a history of childhood trauma.

Since juries took over deciding the death penalty, only two Idaho counties have asked for capital punishment in murder cases. Ada County - Idaho's biggest and most prosperous - hasn't pursued it since being denied twice in 2005.

In 2006, Jim Junior Nice avoided the death penalty after cutting a deal with Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs to plead guilty to murdering his three children.

Loebs told the Idaho Statesman that he made the deal in the Nice case for a variety of reasons - including the fact that Nice's guilty plea means he will never leave prison. But he added that Nice's attorneys would have put on mitigation evidence that their client suffered from mental illness.

Just last month, Cassia County Prosecutor Al Barrus announced he would not seek capital punishment in the first-degree murder case of Gerry Salgado, who is charged with the shooting death of Liopoldo Amescua.

Polls have consistently shown that Idaho is one of the most pro-death penalty states in the nation, but just one person in half a century has been executed here - double-murderer Keith Eugene Wells, who dropped all appeals and demanded lethal injection in 1994.

Unless the Supreme Court changes the rules, capital punishment is the longest of longshots for Idaho prosecutors nowadays. And nobody in Idaho - not the governor, the Legislature, the attorney general nor prosecutors - is in a position to change that.

Source: MagicValley.com, Nov. 5, 2009

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