NEWS (2/10/20): Jurors reached penalty-phase verdicts in four cases during the week of February 4 – 10, 2020, returning three life verdicts and one death sentence.
On February 4, Jamaal Smith was sentenced to life without parole in a Florida triple murder on February 4 after a Polk County jury reached a non-unanimous sentencing recommendation. A co-defendant, Johnathan Alcegaire, was sentenced to death in a separate trial in 2019.
On February 7, Donald Hartung received a life sentence in Pensacola, Florida in a different triple murder, also as a result of a non-unanimous jury vote at sentencing. Hartung’s lawyers had presented evidence that the 63-year-old defendant was suffering from dementia at the time of the murders caused by damage to the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain.
Later in the day, a Clark County, Nevada jury sentenced Ray Charles Brown to life in the 2016 murder of a Las Vegas liquor store clerk during an attempted robbery. Two co-defendants in the murder pled guilty and were sentenced to terms of years.
In a rare Sunday verdict, jurors from Rapides Parish, Louisiana sentenced Kyle Joekel to death for the murders of two St. John Parish sheriff’s deputies in 2010. Prosecutors said Joekel was a member of the “sovereign citizens” movement, an anti-government group that ambushed the deputies in a trailer park. Jurors were selected from Rapides Parish because the publicity in St. John Parish about the highly emotional case made it impossible to select a jury from the parish. A formal sentencing date has not yet been set.
