Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12
Results 11 to 17 of 17

Thread: Robin Lee Row - Idaho Death Row

  1. #11
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Idaho death row inmate Robin Row to have court-appointed mental health exam

    The only woman facing the death penalty in Idaho has been booked into the Ada County Jail this week for a court-appointed mental health exam.

    According to Idaho court records, Row is having a clinical interview at the Ada County Jail with a doctor for the state to defend against claims being raised in Row's upcoming hearing in June.

    The 59-year-old Boise woman was convicted of killing her husband and two children by setting their home on fire in the early 1990s.

    On Feb. 10, 1992, Robin Row woke McHugh up at about 3 a.m., saying she had a feeling that something was wrong with her house.

    The two drove over to the duplex, which was in flames and surrounded by emergency vehicles. Paramedics told Robin Row that her children and husband had been found dead.

    Fire investigators later concluded that someone had intentionally set the fire, feeding the flames with a hot-burning petroleum product. The home's circuit breaker for the smoke detector was also shut off, and the furnace fan was set to run continuously, feeding the flames and circulating the smoke throughout the house. All three victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

    Days later detectives learned that Row had lost other children under suspicious circumstances years earlier: A baby who investigators said died of sudden infant death syndrome and a son who was killed in a 1980 California house fire that investigators ruled accidental. At that point, according to court records, police began to focus their investigation on Row.

    http://kboi2.com/news/local/idaho-de...al-health-exam
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  2. #12
    aclay
    Guest
    What's the status of her case?

  3. #13
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,317
    It’s not on Justia yet but according to Dunham from the “neutral” DPIC, Row was granted habeas relief by the Idaho District Court on ineffective counsel claims.
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  4. #14
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    Is ‘ineffective’ legal counsel enough to appeal a death row sentence? Idaho a test case

    The only woman on Idaho death row is seeking to have her sentence reconsidered, but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week has thrown her active federal appeal into question.

    Robin Row, 64, was convicted of murdering her husband and 2 young children after setting afire their Ada County home in February 1992 to collect money from their life insurance policies. A judge handed her a death sentence, making her just the 2nd woman in Idaho history to receive the death penalty.

    Attorneys representing Row have been appealing her case ever since, now nearly 30 years after she arrived on death row.

    Unlike her 7 male peers who are housed at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Kuna, Row is held at the state’s Women’s Correctional Center in Pocatello.

    Row’s current appeal before the U.S. District Court for Idaho argues that she had ineffective legal counsel, because evidence of brain damage was never introduced during sentencing. A U.S. Supreme Court decision late last month, however, is expected to make pursuing a federal appeal based on assertions of ineffective counsel much more difficult.

    Essentially, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shinn v. Ramirez — a case pertaining to 2 Arizona death row inmates — establishes that unless evidence of ineffective counsel is first presented at the state level, it may not be used in a federal appeal.

    Justice Clarence Thomas issued the court’s 6-3 majority opinion. Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote the dissent, stating the decision will leave many, including those facing execution, “without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel” guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

    Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the legal precedent set by the ruling makes it harder for wrongfully convicted prisoners to prove their innocence, and for those who unconstitutionally received the death penalty to avoid execution.

    The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit takes no formal stance on the death penalty, but has been critiqued by some capital punishment proponents as supportive of anti-death penalty positions.

    “In very practical terms, it means that people who were subjected to multiple unfair proceedings automatically lose,” Dunham told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview.

    “When you’re trying to decide whether someone lives or dies, the single most important thing should be the truth, and you want that decision to be made on the best available evidence.”

    Idaho is one of 24 U.S. states that maintain capital punishment. 3 others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have standing, governor-imposed bans.

    Since 1998, attorneys with the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho have petitioned the federal court system on behalf of Row, after their client’s state-level appeals were exhausted.

    In Idaho federal district court, records show that they have argued, in part, that Row’s previous attorneys failed at her 1993 sentencing hearing to present evidence of her intellectual disabilities, which may have altered the course of her death sentence.

    Gary Raney, a retired Ada County sheriff, was an arson investigator with the department in 1992, when Row’s 2-story duplex burned down that February with her husband and 2 children inside.

    Raney didn’t report the next morning to the family’s rental townhouse west of the Boise Airport thinking the incident was anything more than an accident — and certainly not a homicide, he said. But, upon inspection and interviews with Row, the pieces “started not adding up.”

    Raney told the Statesman he came to learn that Row’s reason for staying with a friend the night before the early morning fire, her whereabouts at approximately the time of incident, and some newly established life insurance policies for her husband and 2 kids were all red flags.

    Investigators later found a storage unit in Meridian where Row had moved furniture and important documents before the fire, and the sheriff’s office began building its case against her. Still early in his law enforcement career, Raney said he felt outmatched by someone he perceived to be a “psychopath.”

    “I always tell people, she was well out of my league,” Raney said in a phone interview.

    “I was a good detective, but she was a better criminal, because she was a psychopath. She knew how to casually deal with it, 6 hours after her family had died.”

    As he continued to investigate, Raney said he discovered Row had 2 previous children — each of whom also died under suspicious circumstances.

    The 1st was a 15-month-old daughter, who died in southern New Hampshire in 1977. At the time, the toddler was said to have died from sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.

    Today, such deaths are understood not to occur beyond a child’s 1st year of life, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention, and court records indicate instead that Row “very likely” killed her daughter.

    Row also had a 6-year-old son, who died in a Northern California cabin fire in 1980. Row collected nearly $30,000 in life insurance money on a policy she opened on her son just a month prior, according to court records.

    “It is also very likely she killed her 6-year-old,” state the court records.

    Row was never prosecuted for the deaths of either of her other 2 children.

    Raney said he’s confident charges would have been brought against Row in California in the case of her 6-year-old’s death if she was acquitted in Idaho.

    She was convicted of the February 1992 murders of her husband and 2 children when she set ablaze the family’s Ada County home.

    Based on a prior 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a death row inmate’s ability to mount an appeal in federal court was affirmed in a 7-2 decision over legal arguments of ineffective counsel. 5 years later, Idaho’s federal district court held a hearing for Row in 2017 based on the argument she had ineffective counsel that failed to present evidence of her brain damage.

    Raney testified as a witness during Row’s federal appeal process, recalling to the Statesman that he described the convicted killer as “incredibly smart” and “very manipulative.”

    His characterizations conflicted with her attorneys’ attempts to show Row as cognitively impaired, based on a pair of brain scans taken prior to the 1992 house fire, which were never introduced by her prior attorneys.

    “I had my professional interactions with her, the interpersonal interactions and was able to see her ability to process details very, very well,” Raney said.

    “But I also fully acknowledge I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist and that there are nuances in the human brain that certainly I don’t understand, and certainly wouldn’t pass judgment on another professional’s opinion.”

    In September 2021, U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a preliminary ruling that the evidence suggested her trial court attorneys “performed deficiently,” according to court records. As a result, he wrote, the case “cries out to be returned to a jury of Row’s peers to decide her fate.”

    “Had Row’s brain abnormalities been presented to the trial court in a timely, comprehensive, and scientific evidence-based manner, there is a reasonable probability of a different outcome in Row’s state sentencing proceedings,” Winmill wrote in his ruling.

    “The decision whether to condemn a human being to die — no matter how despicable the crimes at issue — must be made free from the constraints of the outdated all-or-nothing medicolegal model.”

    But 2 months later, Winmill granted a motion from the state seeking to delay his decision until after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Ramirez case.

    It is not entirely clear what the Supreme Court’s decision could now mean for granting Row a new sentencing hearing.

    The Idaho Department of Correction, which oversees the state’s death row inmates, deferred to the attorney general’s office, which, through a spokesperson, declined comment on pending litigation.

    Row’s Federal Defender Services attorneys also declined to comment. Responses and additional legal filings from both the state and Row’s attorneys are due to Idaho’s federal district court within 60 days following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Ramirez decision.

    (source: Kevin Fixler is an investigative reporter with the Idaho Statesman----idahostatesman.com)
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #15
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,317
    Idaho woman on death row wants her execution sentence vacated

    Row and her defense have filed once again to vacate her death sentence in light of a new U.S Supreme Court decision.

    By Alexandra Duggan
    ktvb.com

    BOISE, Idaho — It’s been 30 years since Robin Lee Row, Idaho’s only current female death row inmate, killed her two children and husband and then set her family duplex on fire, later drudging through a long appeal process, post-conviction relief and multiple supreme court denials – but she’s trying one more time to get off death row.

    Row and her attorneys filed a post-conviction petition at the state level on June 29 of this year, requesting she get an evidentiary hearing and a vacated death sentence that was handed down to her by a judge in December of 1993.

    Row has tried for three decades to seek some sort of change to her sentence. A fourth post-conviction relief attempt was denied in 2008.

    Her newly-filed petition is based on a recent U.S Supreme Court ruling and what her defense says is ineffectiveness of counsel from failure to bring forth evidence of a brain atrophy.

    Reasons to file

    Row’s defense is reasoning that because of a recent U.S Supreme Court ruling, Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, it is now appropriate and timely to “set the clock running” for a new state post-conviction claim.

    The U.S Supreme Court’s decision in May of this year held that federal courts should be confined by the evidence from prior state proceedings, regardless of whether the prisoner had the representation of an effective or ineffective lawyer for trial or post-conviction appeals.

    If certain claims of ineffective counsel are not developed in state court first, federal courts can no longer address them, the Supreme Court held in the 6-3 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority.

    The prosecution in Row's murder trial painted her as a cold, merciless killer, but she was actually brain damaged and had many issues with decision-making, her defense said in a 93-page petition for post-conviction relief.

    The brain atrophy that the defense says Row has had since birth, getting worse with time, was not brought up by any of her defense counsel during trial even though her attorneys at the time knew about the neurological issues, the petition said.

    Row has used this defense before in her appeals to the state, which were denied by the Idaho Supreme Court. However, she can bring up these same claims in a post-conviction petition for relief, which is not limited to a previous court record like appeals are.

    Essentially, this petition following the recent decision of the U.S Supreme Court is establishing claims in a lower court first so it can be later discussed in a federal proceeding.

    After a U.S Supreme Court ruling, petitioners have 42 days to file their claims. The clock began ticking on May 23.

    The murders

    Early in the morning on Feb.10, 1992, residents on Seneca Street in Boise awoke to the sounds of blaring fire trucks and police sirens.

    Part of a duplex on the corner of Five Mile Road was surrounded in flames and billowing clouds of smoke.

    Row’s husband, Randy, and Row's two children, Tabitha Cornellier, 8, and Joshua Cornellier, 10, were found dead inside the home of carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Associated Press archives.

    Row was not at the residence at the time, but rather staying at a friend’s house. She had awoken her friend she was staying with, Joan McHugh, saying something was “wrong with her house.” When the two arrived at the duplex, Row was told her family had perished.

    Fire investigators later said that they believed someone intentionally set the fire.

    The flames were exacerbated with petroleum, the breaker for the smoke detectors in the home was turned off and a fan was running, which was believed to have circulated the smoke throughout the house, the Associated Press reported.

    Vaughn Killeen, who was Ada County Sheriff at the time, told the press that year that he would be charging Row with arson and homicide after an investigation that set their sights on her past.

    Killeen said that Row lost another child in 1980 in what he described as a “suspicious fire” in California and an infant who possibly died of sudden infant death syndrome. A shelter Row worked at was also partly destroyed by a fire when she was working there, but investigators could not confirm if she was involved.

    While Row was being held in the Ada County Jail after being charged with homicide and arson, investigators said she began making phone calls to her friend McHugh, which were then recorded.

    In the trial, investigators said they discovered Row had taken out life insurance policies on her family three weeks before their deaths which raised eyebrows.

    “This was probably the most premeditated, in some ways, premeditated-for-gain murders that I've seen,” former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney previously told KTVB.

    A federal judge who later dismissed one of Row’s appeals noted that there was plenty of overwhelming and powerful circumstantial evidence in the homicides of the three family members.

    When Row was sentenced to die in 1993, Judge Alan Schwartzman called her “the embodiment of a cold-blooded, pitiless slayer.”

    The claims

    Row’s defense says she is pursuing this claim based on ineffectiveness of counsel, not on innocence – because her defense failed to bring forth mitigation evidence of a brain atrophy and tumultuous childhood.

    In the petition, defenders say that Row had difficulties in her family as a child. Her father drank, verbally abused his children and committed many thefts, and Row was sexually abused by her grandfather, it said.

    She wet the bed until her early teen years, was picked on at school, witnessed abuse between her family members and was embarrassed of her parents’ unclean and unkempt house, it said.

    “Counsel failed to visit — or send anyone to visit — the town where Ms. Row grew up, or to investigate the circumstances of that town,” the petition said.

    The petition states that Row has lived with a congenital brain atrophy, which was made worse by her disruptive childhood. A computed tomography scan was conducted in 1993 which the defense said indicated brain damage. They claimed it was confirmed by more imaging in 2001 and 2016.

    “Ms. Row’s cerebellum can be clearly seen with large gaps in brain tissue in the parietal region and between the cortex and the perimeter of the skull,” it said, and that the cerebellum looks like a “shrunken broccoli” and that it is “remarkably abnormal.”

    The defense said in their petition that a major function of the cerebellum is to modify learning, behavior, judgment, decision making, planning and mood, citing testimony from neurologists from a previous federal evidentiary hearing.

    Additionally, the petition said there may have been abuse within her own marriage with Randy Row, and one of the original defense’s strategies was to construct a theory that Robin Row’s husband had a damaged frontal lobe that “increased the chances he committed the crime to punish his wife.” Row’s current counsel says this is ironic, as the defense should have also focused on their own client’s brain damage first.

    This mitigating evidence was not brought to the table at Row’s sentencing, it said, which violated her “right to effective assistance of trial counsel.”

    The petition stated that her attorneys at the time were made aware of Row’s brain scans and familial history, and if they had presented this information during sentencing, “there would have been a reasonable probability of a life sentence.”

    Given the gravity of a death penalty case, there is a “heightened obligation” to pursue mitigation evidence during sentencing, the documents say — and no one investigated further.

    Detectives and specialists hardly looked into Row’s past, her attorneys claim, and failed to present it in any meaningful way. They also claim the specialists that were introduced were hardly qualified as experts in relation to Row’s history. Additionally, they said, there is no evidence that further neuropsychiatric evaluations occurred as recommended.

    Row’s current defense says certain doctors' analyses of Row’s brain were “exceedingly preliminary” as they conducted personality tests rather than neuropsychological tests, incapable of truly diagnosing brain damage, the petition said.

    “Trial counsel had such a line of inquiry dropped in their laps in the form of a report from an independent doctor finding brain damage and suggesting further exploration, thus alerting them that one of the most powerful mitigators in the capital world was present. They failed to conduct that exploration, and they were grossly deficient as a result,” the petition said.

    “She did get the death penalty, and it's just being dragged on and on and on at the expense of everybody,” Randy Row's older sister Chris Danielson told KTVB in 2012.

    Row currently resides at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pocatello. She is 64 years old. If Row was given an option to be re-sentenced, it would likely be before a jury rather than from a judge like her sentencing in 1993.

    A motion hearing in this case is scheduled for Aug. 2 at 1 p.m.

    https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/cr...b-5043af934c07
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  6. #16
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Federal judge denies resentencing appeal for only woman on Idaho death row

    By Kevin Fixler
    The Idaho Statesman

    A federal judge has denied an appeal from the only woman on Idaho death row, who sought to be resentenced based on claims she had inadequate legal representation when she was on trial for three murders 30 years ago.

    Robin Row, 65, was convicted by a jury in 1993 on three counts of felony first-degree murder after setting her family’s Ada County home ablaze, killing her husband and two young children. In a federal appeal, Row’s attorneys with the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho argued that evidence of their client’s traumatic brain injury was never introduced during her sentencing, illustrating ineffective legal counsel.

    U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill dismissed Row’s case Friday. Winmill issued a preliminary ruling in fall 2021 that her sentencing should be returned to a jury. But in May 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that unless evidence of ineffective legal counsel is first presented at the state level, it cannot later be grounds for a federal appeal.

    Winmill wrote last week that he made his final decision “with great reluctance” following the Supreme Court decision.

    “Under the current state of the law, the court can do nothing to provide a remedy to (the) petitioner,” Winmill wrote. “This is a direct consequence of Idaho’s shortsighted and sometimes inadequate system of expedited justice for death penalty cases” and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.

    Row’s attorneys said in a statement Tuesday they will appeal Winmill’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which oversees federal cases from Idaho.

    The U.S. District Court of Idaho’s hands were tied “due to a superseding change in law that prevented it from considering the ineffectiveness of prior counsel,” Deborah Czuba, supervising attorney for the nonprofit’s unit that specializes in death penalty cases, said in a written statement. “While doing so, the court recognized that Ms. Row has suffered a clear violation of her constitutional rights.”

    Attorneys representing Row appealed her initial conviction in March 1993. Since that time, Row has been housed at the state’s Women’s Correctional Center in Pocatello, instead of at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution outside of Kuna, with the rest of the state’s death row inmates – all men.

    Row sentenced to death by prior law, now ruled unconstitutional
    After Row’s conviction, a 4th District Court judge sentenced her to death under a prior state law. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 later found the Idaho law unconstitutional under the Sixth Amendment.

    Only a jury may sentence a prisoner to death, the court ruled in a 7-2 decision, and Idaho passed a law the next year to grant that authority to juries alone. A subsequent 2004 U.S. Supreme Court ruling by a 5-4 decision did not overturn past cases where a judge handed down a death sentence.

    “She was not sentenced to death by a jury, as would be constitutionally required today, but rather a single judge,” Czuba said. “She since has had multiple health issues that make it difficult for her to walk and sometimes lead to confusion. She has been a model inmate who is well liked by staff at the prison.”

    Row also had two prior children who each died under suspicious circumstances, but she was never prosecuted for any crimes involving their deaths. Her 15-month-old daughter was thought to have died of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, in New Hampshire in 1977, and a 6-year-old son died in Northern California in a cabin fire in 1980.

    Row is the second woman to receive the death penalty in Idaho. The first was Karla Windsor in 1984. A year later, the Idaho Supreme Court threw out Windsor’s death sentence, and a federal judge resentenced her to life in prison with the chance of parole after 10 years. Windsor was later released from Idaho prison in December 2004.

    Including Row, Idaho has eight prisoners on death row.

    The Idaho Legislature recently passed a bill, which Gov. Brad Little signed, that mandates the state prisons system execute death row inmates by firing squad if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. The law takes effect July 1.

    https://www.spokesman.com/stories/20...eal-for-only-/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #17
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,317
    On April 24, 2023, Row filed an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    https://dockets.justia.com/docket/ci...s/ca9/23-99004
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •