Robert Ray Fry - New Mexico Death Row

[Guest]

Summary of Offense:

On death row for five years after his conviction for the 2000 stabbing and bludgeoning death of Betty Lee, a Shiprock mother of five. Fry also got three life sentences for three other murder convictions.

[Heidi]

The state Supreme Court will hear the appeal of serial killer Robert Fry in a 15-year-old double murder, but even a victory will not free him from New Mexico's death row.

Fry is challenging his convictions in the stabbing deaths of two men at the Eclectic, a store in Farmington that sold posters, pipes, knives and swords. The Supreme Court on May 10 will listen to oral arguments on whether his conviction should be set aside.

Fry is serving two life sentences for killing Matthew Trecker, 18, and Joseph Fleming, 25. Both died in the store on Thanksgiving night 1996 after their bodies were slashed and their throats cut.

Fry is on death row for another murder, that of a mother of five in San Juan County.

A cohort of Fry's, Harold Pollock, said he was in the store during the murders of Trecker and Fleming.

Pollock said Fry alone killed them.

Fry's appeal centers on the fact that Pollock refused to testify at Fry's murder trial in 2005, but that the judge allowed prosecutors to read into the record what Pollock had said at a preliminary hearing four years earlier.

Nancy Simmons, an Albuquerque lawyer who is handling Fry's appeal, said his trial attorney had no opportunity to cross-examine Pollock. She said this violated Fry's constitutional right to confront his accuser.

A second claim in the appeal is that Sandra Price, then the district attorney of San Juan County, knew of a conflict that tainted the
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state's prosecution of Fry, but forged ahead anyway to obtain a conviction.

Pollock was represented in the store murders by an attorney named Randall Roberts. Roberts negotiated a plea for Pollock while also representing Fry in a different case.

Simmons said this was a clear conflict, a lawyer working for and against Fry at the same time.

Worse still, Simmons said, district attorney Price knew of the conflict but allowed the case against Fry to continue anyway. Simmons said Price was "in plain violation of the rules of professional conduct."

Motions made to disqualify the San Juan district attorney's staff and to suppress Pollock's statement should have been granted by the trial judge, Simmons said in her appellate brief.

The state attorney general's staff responded that evidence of Fry's guilt was overwhelming, and that the overall record showed he received a fair trial.

Physical evidence tied Fry to the murders of Trecker and Fleming, the attorney general said. Specifically, footprints showed that the killer wore a size 9 to size 11 shoe. Fry wore a 10 1/2. Pollock was a size 7.

In addition, Fry bragged to numerous people that he had committed the murders, the state said.

As for alleged misconduct by former district attorney Price, the state attorney general's staff also criticized her but said any lapse was not significant enough to overturn Fry's convictions.

"... While district attorney Price's conduct may have fallen short of the ideal, the defendant has not even established the clear violation of the rule" of professional conduct, the state said. "At worst, Price did not act in a diligent manner in complying with her ethical obligations."

Price in 2004 won election as a judge in the 11th Judicial District in northwestern New Mexico and is still on the bench.

Fry, now 37, would still be a condemned man even if he wins this appeal.

He is on death row for a different murder — the 2000 bludgeoning of Betty Lee in San Juan County.

Fry struck Lee with a sledgehammer and stabbed her. She was 36 years old.

The New Mexico Supreme Court in 2005 upheld Fry's conviction and death sentence in Lee's murder.

Fry also was convicted in a third murder case in San Juan County.

He used a shovel to beat and kill Donald Tsosie, 40, in 1998. Prosecutors said Fry also gouged Tsosie's eyes with a stick, then pushed his body down a cliff a few miles south of Farmington.

Fry in 2003 received a life sentence for Tsosie's murder. He had been sentenced to death the year before for Lee's murder.

The state Legislature in 2009 repealed the death penalty in New Mexico. But that decision did not undo the death sentences of two inmates, Fry and Timothy Allen of Bloomfield.

As for Pollock, he is serving a life sentence as an accessory in the store murders.

http://www.currentargus.com/ci_17935619

[Heidi]

Supreme Court affirms convictions of Robert Fry for killing 2 in Farmington in 1996

The state Supreme Court has upheld the convictions of a Farmington man for killing two people in the northwestern New Mexico community in 1996.

Robert Fry is on death row for another murder.

The court on Thursday upheld Fry's convictions and two life sentences for the November 1996 killings of Matthew Trecker and Joseph Fleming. The Farmington men were stabbed and their throats were slashed in the now-defunct Eclectic, a counterculture store in the city.

The justices said there was sufficient evidence to support Fry's convictions and they found no problems with his trial.

Fry has been sentenced to die by injection for the murder of Betty Lee in 2000, and he's serving a life sentence for the 1998 killing of Donald Tsosie.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...M--Fry-Murder/

[MRBAM]

Death penalty challenges still haunt NM courts

By Leslie Linthicum
Albuquerque Journal

ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Three years ago and again last year, the attorney for Michael Astorga argued that because we wiped the death penalty from the state's lawbooks before Astorga was tried for murder it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment if it were still applied to him.

The first time that argument was made was before Astorga had been convicted. The second time was before he had been sentenced.

The New Mexico Supreme Court passed off the hot potato both times by deciding not to decide and left unsettled one of the legal wrinkles left in the wake of the Legislature's 2009 death penalty repeal.

Astorga eventually received a life sentence, making the argument moot for him, but the court will get other chances to rule on this life-and-death issue.

Robert Fry and Timothy Allen, both sentenced to death years ago, remain on New Mexico's figurative "death row." Fry is in Santa Fe and Allen in Los Lunas, and they are both at various stages in the drawn-out appeals process that follows every death sentence.

Allen received the death penalty in 1995 for the strangulation of a 17-year-old girl in Flora Vista in San Juan County. The state Supreme Court last year reinstated his habeas corpus petition, which remains pending in state District Court in San Juan County.

Fry was sentenced to death for the June 9, 2000, slaying of a 36-year-old mother of five from Shiprock, also in San Juan County. (He has been sentenced to three life terms for three other murders.) His death sentence has been upheld and his habeas corpus petition is also pending in District Court in San Juan County.

Both inmates have the further option of federal habeas corpus petitions after they have exhausted their remedies in state court.

Meanwhile, attorneys for both men will pursue the argument that the death penalty, once repealed in a state, violates the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

It's an interesting argument that involves all of us, not just the two men facing the death penalty. That's because one line of the argument is that when a society - in this case us, through our lawmakers - has agreed to no longer punish by execution, carrying out a death sentence violates our collective standards of decency, which amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

You could certainly make the case that capital punishment is unusual when you're one of two guys among a population of 2 million that can be executed by a state that has carried out exactly one execution in more than half a century.

Juries here have rarely handed down the penalty, it has rarely been upheld on appeal and it has been very rarely carried out.

Allen's attorney, Melissa Hill, described the chances of being put to death in New Mexico as "almost a lightning strike." That's being generous. Only one man, Terry Clark, has been killed by the state in the past 52 years. New Mexico has more than a dozen lightning deaths every decade.

The counterargument on the prosecution side is that we spoke through our legislators when the death penalty was repealed and lawmakers were explicit in extending the repeal only to murders committed after the repeal went into effect. That isn't arbitrary, the argument goes, but the people's will.

And on a national landscape, capital punishment is still the rule, not the exception.

All of the half-dozen defendants who were in the court system and facing possible death sentences when the law was changed were either found not guilty, pleaded guilty to lesser charges or, in the case of Astorga, sentenced to life in prison when jurors could not agree on the death penalty.

If some older unsolved murders were to be solved, more death penalty cases could pop up, but it's only Allen and Fry whose lives depend on the outcome of the argument now.