Even though, according to police, neither of them had pulled the trigger, Luis Hidalgo III and Anabel Espindola faced a potential death penalty for the 2005 murder of Timothy Hadland. The Clark County District Attorney’s office alleged that the two had procured the trigger man who did kill Hadland, and believed that that was sufficient reason to seek capital punishment against Hidalgo and Espindola.
On December 27, the Supreme Court of Nevada disagreed.
Setting a precedent, the court decided that the charge of solicitation for murder was not a sufficient aggravating circumstance required to pursue the death penalty, as it does not constitute the use or threat of violence under Nevada law. Moreover, the court ruled that the other aggravator used by the state to support capital punishment—“murder for hire”—was invalid because the district attorney substantiated it with multiple alternative theories. It lacked specificity, the court said, and therefore must be stricken as an aggravator.
“The Supreme Court has essentially held that the state can no longer cast the Notice of In tent to Seek Death Penalty in such broad terms and must commit to a factual basis of the underlying theory,” says Dominic Gentile, the attorney who filed the writ of mandamus on behalf of Hidalgo.
Moreover, he says: “It seems that the state pursues the death penalty more often than it should and in somewhat haphazard fashion in the eyes of our Supreme Court.”
In effect, the state’s highest court sent a message to district attorneys—that they must be more careful and more specific when asserting aggravators that warrant the death penalty, says President of the ACLU of Nevada Richard Siegel.
“This decision has to be seen in the broader perspective,” Siegel, also a political science professor at UNR, says. “It’s very important to see this as a pattern and not an isolated decision.”
It’s true. Eligibility for, and employment of, the death penalty has recently come under the butcher’s knife in Nevada, one of the 37 states to maintain use of capital punishment. In June of 2006, the Nevada Supreme Court established the McConnell rule, which limits certain criteria by which district attorneys can seek the death penalty. The following November it decided that the McConnell rule was retroactively applicable, thus enabling more than half the state’s death row population to file new appeals. Some of which, one Clark County district attorney stated at the time, the state will probably lose.
Last October, convicted murderer William Castillo was delivered from execution in his evil hour when the ACLU of Nevada put up a challenge before the Supreme Court to the drug protocol in the use of lethal injections, prompting a moratorium on such executions until the case is further heard.
“We’ve seen the Supreme Court take a different approach to criminal justice in the last three years,” says Siegel. “There’s been a dramatic decline in both the number of death penalty cases and actual executions here.”
He adds that changes started to become noticeable when judges Michael Cherry and James Hardesty were elected to the Supreme Court in 2006 and 2004, respectively.
Yet, Siegel says, the abolitionist’s dream is far from realized. There are still more aggravators by which the state can seek death here than in most states, and Nevada still does not operate with the mind-set that capital punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst, he says. There are currently 81 individuals on death row.