Federal court rejects Sivak’s latest appeals

BOISE – A federal court judge Friday rejected all of the appeals of Lacey Mark Sivak, who has spent 27 years on Idaho’s death row for the slaying of a Garden City woman.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Boise barred Sivak from bringing the appeals before the court again.

Attorneys for Sivak said they could not comment because they hadn’t yet read the 73-page ruling. The likely next steps for the defense team include asking Winmill to reconsider or appealing to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sivak was sentenced to death in 1981 for the stabbing and shooting murder of his former co-worker, Dixie Wilson, at a gas station in Garden City.

Now the longest-serving inmate currently on death row, Sivak has filed dozens of appeals and petitions. He had his death sentence vacated at least twice by the Idaho Supreme Court because of technical problems with the mitigating evidence presented in his case. The state continued to seek the death penalty, however, and in 1992 Sivak was again sentenced to death.

In the most recent round of appeals, Sivak made several claims, including that witnesses in his murder trial were unreliable and testified in return for favors from the state; that prosecutors wrongly failed to disclose letters between a law enforcement officer and a witness; that Sivak was denied due process because of errors during trial; and that the judge was biased because Sivak’s father had asked the judge to execute Sivak.