Hall trial a textbook case for new sentencing rules

BOISE – An Ada County jury’s decision to sentence a 33-year-old transient to death this week did not surprise experts, who agreed the rape and strangulation of a flight attendant were so shocking that jurors had little choice.

“If ever a jury was going to impose a death penalty, I can understand why they did it in this case,” said Craig Hemmens, a criminal justice professor who specializes in the death penalty at Boise State University. “It was an open and shut case on the evidence.”

The jury deliberated only six hours on Wednesday before becoming the first in Idaho history to order an execution. There was no reaction from Erick Virgil Hall as the verdict was read.

Just five days earlier, the same jury convicted Hall of raping and then strangling Lynn Henneman, attacking the 38-year-old New York woman as she walked along Boise’s popular Greenbelt along the Boise River on Sept. 24, 2000. DNA evidence proved Hall raped her.

“You’re dealing with every communities’ worst nightmare,” David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said on Thursday.

Elliott added that emotion and concern can easily sway juries toward executions. Overall, however, Elliot and others said juries are free of political considerations that he believes could, although not necessarily did, haunt elected judges when the death penalty decision was in their hands.

Studies have found that death sentences per capita were lower in states where juries make the decision than in those where judges decided.

Idaho’s system was completely revamped two years ago after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries had to at least determine that sufficient aggravating factors existed in the crime to justify execution. State lawmakers, intent on eliminating any cloud over the death penalty’s legality, turned the entire decision over to juries.

Hall, who goes on trial next spring for a second murder charge, joins 20 other convicted killers, who were sentenced to death by judges. All those sentences are under appeal or in various stages of reconsideration, and Hall’s conviction and sentence are subject to automatic review by the state Supreme Court.

Ada County Prosecutor Greg Bower was uncertain about claims that juries are less likely than judges to impose a death sentence, but he agreed that there is a difference handling a case for a jury.

“You need three things,” Bower said. “You need a brutal crime, you need overwhelming proof of guilt, and I think the other thing is that we have an innocent victim. That is the formula that jurors want to impose the death penalty, and if you don’t have one of those three things than I believe you’ll have trouble.”

Kathryn Kase, the capital case defender in Harris County, Texas, which sends more killers to death row than most states, agreed that the facts of each case are critical.

“Jurors are regular people just like judges, and they can be overwhelmed” by cases of young or vulnerable victims with particularly gory details, said Kase, who is part of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It’s really difficult for people to keep their emotions in check and look at the facts dispassionately. Death is not pretty.”

Hemmens predicted that juries will deal with capital murder cases as judges did after getting authority in the late 1980s to impose a life prison term without any possibility of parole. Judges turned to the death penalty far less frequently after that than before.

“When they know they’re really not getting out, then maybe there’s not the need to kill them,” Hemmens said.

Colin Garrett, another association member who handles death penalty appeals from Atlanta, said the rising number of men being released from death rows across the nation because they were wrongly convicted is also beginning to have an effect on jury deliberations. He said the Death Penalty Information Center is tracking a decline in death sentences nationally.

Although Idaho juries render their decision on a death sentence only days after convicting the murderer, Garrett says the possibility of making a mistake is part of juror deliberations.

“They definitely keep that in the back of their minds,” Garrett said, “and that’s one of the things contributing to the decline in the death penalty.”