After 5 hours of testimony Friday, the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency refused to commute the death sentence of Robert Moormann, who murdered and dismembered his mother in Florence in 1984.
Moormann, 63, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday.
Moormann was already serving a 9-years-to-life sentence for kidnapping an 8-year-old girl in 1972. In 1984, he was granted a three-day "compassionate furlough" to visit Roberta Maude Moormann, who traveled from Flagstaff to stay with her adopted son at the Blue Mist Motel across the street from the state prison complex in Florence.
Speaking from a metal cage in a prison auditorium Friday, Moormann, 63, told the clemency board that he did not remember the murder. All he recalled, he said, was touching his mother's breasts while she was tied to a bed and then carrying her body to the bathroom.
The testimony focused on Moormann's diminished mental capacity and the alleged sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his adoptive mother.
A forensic psychiatrist who had interviewed and evaluated Moormann referred to him Friday as "the worst piece of protoplasm you'll ever see."
"This man was born condemned," the psychiatrist said.
Of the 130 inmates on Arizona's death row, only 6 have been there longer than Moormann.
The killing prompted the state to change its policy on compassionate furloughs.
Moormann said Roberta had molested him as a child, but that was never corroborated. Those who knew the pair said Roberta was "at most ... an overly protective mother who had an odd relationship with her son," according to court records.
Moormann has told conflicting stories of Roberta's death, saying he accidentally suffocated her during sex and later that she had begun sexually abusing him again, prompting him to kill her in a fit of rage.
Medical examiners found no evidence of sexual contact between Moormann and Roberta. They also found that she had been alive when she received cuts and bruises covering her body and that "the dismemberment showed no rage, but rather a methodical, meticulous activity," court records say.
Moormann has had a slew of health problems over the years and most recently was hospitalized last week.
The attorneys say Moormann was diagnosed in early childhood as being mentally disabled, and the state cannot legally execute him. Arizona law prohibits the mentally disabled from being put to death, and a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision found that executing mentally disabled inmates amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
State prosecutors argue in court documents that a doctor evaluating Moormann in 1998 found that he had an estimated IQ of between 70 and 90, and that Arizona considers a person mentally disabled only if the IQ is 70 or less.
Prosecutors say that at trial, another doctor estimated Moormann's IQ to be at 94 and testified that he was not mentally disabled.
A jury convicted Moormann of first-degree murder after two hours of deliberations, rejecting his insanity defense.
Although the trial judge did find that Moormann had an impaired ability to understand right from wrong, he cited several reasons why Moormann deserved the death penalty, including that the murder was especially heinous and cruel.
Source: The Republic, Feb. 24, 2012