Todd Ice (left), who became the youngest person on death row in the United States after he was convicted at age 15 of murdering a neighbor in Powell County, but who later was released despite concerns he would kill again, died Thursday in a hospital in Missouri.
He was 47, and died on his birthday.
Ice died of an apparent heart attack, according to his father, Dean Ice, who lives near Muncie, Ind.
Syl Knox, whose daughter, Donna, was 7 when she was stabbed to death by Ice in 1978, said he and his wife Sheila were relieved to hear about Ice's death from a reporter. Sheila Knox, who was bound, beaten and stabbed by Ice, survived and identified him as the assailant.
Death penalty opponents at the time protested sentencing such a young defendant to death, and the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled it violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to execute anyone who was under 18 at the time of their crime.
But the Knoxes and many in Powell County said that if Ice was old enough to kill, he was old enough to die for it.
When the Kentucky Supreme Court in 1983 reversed his conviction and death sentence, saying the prosecutor's examination of witnesses “read like a bad television scenario,” it ignited a furor in Eastern Kentucky, including an unsuccessful effort to recall two justices.
Tried again in 1986, Ice's new legal team presented additional evidence he was psychotic at the time of the crimes, including evidence of insanity on both sides of his family, and the jury convicted him of the lesser offense of manslaughter during extreme emotional disturbance.
The jury's 20-year sentence left Ice immediately eligible for parole, but his new legal team, public advocates Kevin McNally and Gail Robinson, conceded their client wasn't ready to be released and begged the state Parole Board to order the state corrections department to treat his mental illness.
The board, however, inundated with petitions from 13,000 angry Eastern Kentucky residents, refused to order treatment and denied Ice parole, ordering him to serve every day of his sentence.
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