Iain Hay Gordon, a lonely army conscript, was charged with her murder on the strength of a dodgy confession and a cooked-up alibi, his sentence mitigated by a plea of temporary insanity.
It was a relatively lenient sentence, perhaps mitigated by league officials' knowledge of what Rypien was going through.
Romano argues that, as in capital cases, his clients deserve to ask for lesser sentences based on "mitigating evidence" — often of child abuse, mental illness or mental retardation.
Oleksandr wrote a petition for mitigating Sergey's sentence.
Twelve years ago, while refusing to declare capital punishment unconstitutional as applied to the retarded, the Supreme Court set aside Mr. Penry's sentence on the ground that Texas law did not permit the jury to give full consideration to a defendant's diminished intellectual functioning as a factor mitigating against a death sentence.
Particularly, He ordered the State of Pennsylvania to commence new sentencing proceedings within 180 days and ruled that it was unconstitutional to require that a jury's finding of circumstances mitigating against determining a sentence of death be unanimous.
In 2001, he was sentenced to death again, after a jury determined that there was not sufficient mitigating evidence to warrant a sentence of life imprisonment.
A California law taking effect Jan . 1provides a way to mitigate sentences for inmates who committed crimes when they were teenagers.
Mr. Muhammad's lawyers tried to weed out people who might feel that the killings were so horrible that death would be the only acceptable punishment -- without regard to mitigating evidence in the sentencing phase.
Mr. Penry's case was the subject of a 1989 Supreme Court decision that reversed his first death sentence because the jury had not been allowed to fully consider mitigating evidence about his history and mental impairment.
