Killer’s new sentencing phase starts

SODA SPRINGS, Idaho – A defense attorney argued that convicted killer Timothy Alan Dunlap shouldn’t be executed because he has been mentally ill since childhood and had escaped from an Indiana mental institution before murdering an Idaho bank teller.

Blackfoot attorney David Parmenter spoke for Dunlap — originally from Sellersburg, Ind. — as a sentencing hearing got under way Monday in 6th District Court, where Dunlap was convicted of the teller’s death.

Deputy Attorney General Ken Robins told jurors that Dunlap is a cold-blooded killer.

Dunlap, 37, has already spent nearly 14 years on Idaho’s death row for the 1991 shotgun slaying of Tonya Crane during the robbery of the Security State Bank in Soda Springs. In 1992, 6th District Judge William Woodland sentenced him to death by lethal injection.

Last year, however, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that procedural mistakes made after Dunlap pleaded guilty to first-degree murder entitled him to a new sentencing hearing.