Bonistall slaying: Death penalty ruling brings angst to family
The focus for Kathleen and Mark Bonistall has always been their slain daughter's legacy.
What became of her killer was secondary.
But it was still jolting when the White Plains couple learned on Tuesday that the Delaware Supreme Court had ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional. And frustrating, because no one is sure yet what that means for James Cooke and the other 12 men on Delaware's death row.
"There's relief knowing that Lindsey's killer can never hurt anyone else," Kathleen said. "But it doesn't bode well for me that he could be let off the hook."
Lindsey Bonistall was a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Delaware when Cooke broke into her off-campus apartment in Newark on May 1, 2005, and raped and strangled her.
He was first convicted and sentenced to death in 2007. When that was overturned, her family went through another trial in 2012. He was found guilty again and given the death penalty.
Delaware's highest court on Tuesday ruled that judges were given too much power in death penalty cases. They found that the Sixth Amendment requires that juries approving execution must unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt decide that aggravating circumstances outweigh mitigating ones.
The court took up the issue this year after the U.S. Supreme Court found Florida's death penalty was similarly flawed. Those two states and Alabama were the only ones of the 30 states with capital punishment that allowed judges to decide if the death penalty was warranted and even to impose the penalty if the jury did not.
The state Department of Justice can appeal the decision. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General said Wednesday the office was not commenting on the ruling.
Tuesday's court ruling ends all pending death penalty cases, but did not address what happens to those already on death row.
Kathleen Bonistall said she hopes the ruling is not retroactive.
Santino Ceccotti, who argued Cooke's case on behalf of the state public defender, said the ruling would ideally empty death row but they are still researching how the older cases should be treated.
Kathleen McCrae, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, said lawyers could ask the state board of pardons to recommend commutation of the death sentences to life in prison in light of the new ruling.
But because the state's death penalty was deemed constitutional at the time the sentences were imposed, state prosecutors could argue to keep the inmates on death row. McCrae suggested most of the 13 death sentences were recommended by juries that did not come to a unanimous verdict.
The jury at Cooke's first trial voted unanimously for the death penalty. At his retrial, the vote was 11-1.
The judges found that found it was up to the state General Assembly to decide whether to restore the death penalty with legal adjustments.
The ruling, however, has raised the likelihood that Delaware will be the latest state to forego capital punishment. The state Senate passed a bill this year abolishing the death penalty. The House narrowly defeated the measure, but before a new vote was taken, the matter was put on hold pending the state court review.
Cooke, now 46, has not exhausted his appeals in the case. His initial appeal, arguing that he wasn't given enough time to prepare for his retrial after firing his lawyers, was not taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Bonistalls have spent more than a decade building up PEACE OUTside Campus, the Lindsey M. Bonistall Foundation, which promotes off-campus student safety in college communities.
They were never ardent supporters of the death penalty, and even pushed for a life sentence for Cooke in 2012 if he had agreed to plead guilty and forego a second trial. But he didn't, and the Bonistalls feel that the continued pursuit of justice for Lindsey means seeing Cooke's death sentence upheld.
"I feel for the other families who have gone through these trials in capital cases, with all the extraneous angst and hardship that goes along with them. And even all the jurors who didn't come to these decisions with ease," Kathleen Bonistall said. "Those killers have been put on death row for a reason.
"At the end of the day for it to just be over is hard to take."
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/crim...ling/88000382/
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