Inmate's killer not identified
Whoever is eventually charged with the murder of a state prison inmate could end up on Oregon’s death row.
Four of the 37 inmates on death row — including Gary Haugen, whose bid to die voluntarily was blocked June 20 by the Oregon Supreme Court — are there because their aggravated murder convictions involve the killing of an inmate.
Officials on the Marion County Homicide Assault Response Team were continuing to investigate Monday the death of Joseph Akins Jr., 45, a convicted murderer who was found dead Saturday in his cell at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
The state medical examiner determined Sunday that Akins died of “inflicted trauma,” and officials said a yet-to-be-identified suspect was being held in segregation at the prison. The name was withheld on instructions from the Marion County district attorney, pending completion of the team’s investigation.
Akins had been in prison on one count of murder since January 2008. His earliest release date was in December 2022.
He was one of two men sentenced in connection with the rape and stabbing of Susan Rae Hosler of Milwaukie in 1994. The crime went unsolved for years, but DNA evidence in 2002 linked Andrew Tignor to the killing, and further investigation linked Akins. They were brothers-in-law, and both were charged in 2004.
Under Oregon’s definition of aggravated murder, defendants can be sentenced to death — or life without the possibility of parole — if they were convicted of murder anywhere previously, or if they were in custody at the time of the murder.
In the Haugen case, he and Jason Van Brumwell had been convicted of murder previously, Haugen for the 1981 killing of the mother of his former girlfriend, and Van Brumwell for the 1994 killing of a Eugene convenience-store clerk. Both had been sentenced to life in prison.
In 2003 they killed David Shane Polin, 31, in the activities yard of the state penitentiary and were convicted in 2007 of aggravated murder.
Also among death-row inmates is David Lee Cox, 48, who was convicted of aggravated murder for the 1998 stabbing death of Mark Dean Davis in the activities yard of the penitentiary. Cox said Davis had stolen drugs from him.
Two other inmates were convicted of aggravated murder in the 2008 death of Antonio Barrantes-Vasquez in the yard of the penitentiary.
But only Isaac Creed Agee, now 36, was sentenced to death for the killing in June 2011.
James Demetri Davenport, the other inmate, was ruled ineligible for a death sentence because of mild mental retardation. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2002 that execution of mentally ill defendants violated the federal constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishments, and Davenport was sentenced in a separate proceeding in 2010.
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/arti...not-identified
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