Roger Lee Gillett - Mississippi
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Summary of Offense:
Was one of two people charged in the March 2004 deaths of Linda Heintzelman and Heintzelman's boyfriend, Vernon Hulett, both of Hattiesburg. Their bodies were found inside the freezer at an abandoned farm in Russell County, Kan., by law officers who were searching for drugs. Gillett's former girlfriend and accomplice in the murders, Lisa Jo Chamberlin, received the same fate during her trial in August 2006.
Gillett was sentenced to death on November 4, 2007.
Read more on Lisa Jo Chamberlin here.
Miss. high court looks at 'harmless' errors law in death penalty cases
The Mississippi Supreme Court is looking at the constitutionality of a 1994 state law that allows it to find “harmless” errors committed by juries in death penalty cases.
Roger Lee Gillett is challenging the law in a post-conviction petition that seeks to overturn his death sentence or to get him a new trial. The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for Nov. 13 in Jackson.
Gillett was convicted in 2007 in Forrest County on two counts of capital murder for his role in the deaths of a Hattiesburg couple and the transporting of their bodies to Kansas in a freezer.
While in custody in Kansas, he attempted to escape. That crime was one of the aggravating factors prosecutors presented jurors to support the death penalty.
The law was enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in another Mississippi capital case in 1990 that state appellate courts can uphold murderers’ death sentences, even if their sentencing juries wrongly considered some adverse evidence.
In the 1990 case, Chandler Clemons had challenged the reweighing of the sentencing evidence in his case. The case dealt only with the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial, not Clemons’ convictions.
In Mississippi, the death penalty can be imposed by a jury only after it finds certain aggravating circumstances. Aggravating circumstances include particularly heinous acts of violence, violent criminal histories or other factors that warrant the death penalty as determined by judges and juries.
However, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court said jurors, not judges, had to decide whether sufficient aggravating circumstances existed to support a death penalty decision.
In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court said a death sentence must be set aside if a jury considered inadmissible evidence that otherwise would not have been before it.
Gillett has seized on those decisions in arguing his due process rights were violated and the law is unconstitutional.
Gillett was convicted in 2007 in Forrest County on two counts of capital murder for his role in the deaths of a Hattiesburg couple and the transporting of their bodies to Kansas in a freezer.
The Mississippi Supreme Court found in 2010 that the attempted escape issue was harmless error and there was sufficient evidence to convict Gillett in spite of it.
Gillett’s attorneys now argue Mississippi law “exclusively assigns the weighing to the jury” by letting juries decide both the facts that should be considered and the actual sentence.
“The jury is assigned the duty of imposition of sentence. The role of each independent fact found by the jury is not independent from other aggravating facts but is part of a set that are considered collectively,” Gillett’s attorneys said.
The attorney general’s office argued the ruling in Clemons’ case was that an appeals court, such as the Mississippi Supreme Court, can “reweigh the evidence or conduct a harmless error analysis” based on what the jury found.
The attorney general argued that courts are not required to reverse a death sentence when they find such “harmless errors” would not have affected the verdict.
http://www.clarionledger.com/viewart...-penalty-cases