The Utah Supreme Court could grant a new trial or penalty hearing to a condemned triple-killer who was shackled at trial and prohibited by a judge from speaking to the jury.
Attorneys representing David Franklin Young appeared before the justices for arguments Wednesday on Young's appeal of his death sentence for the 1987 torture sex-slaying of a Salt Lake County woman.The high court took the matter under advisement after more than two hours of arguments.
Lawyers Karen Stam and Joan Watt argued, in an appeal touching on 27 issues, that the jury selection process in Young's trial was prejudicial and that 3rd District Judge Timothy R. Hanson erred by not allowing Young to speak to the jury before he was sentenced.
The lawyers protested Hanson's unilateral decision to have Young shackled during the penalty phase of his 1988 trial.
And they argued that Hanson's inclusion of a jury instruction prohibiting jurors from considering mercy assured their client would receive a death sentence.
The attorneys said the judge also erred when he refused to allow the jury to consider a guilty but mentally ill verdict, even though experts had testified Young suffered from "organic brain syndrome" and has the mental age of a 10-year-old.
Assistant Utah Attorney General Sandra Sjogren admitted Hanson made a mistake by not allowing Young to speak to the court."
But Sjogren said nothing Young would have said would have changed the outcome of the trial.
Young was convicted for the Aug. 19, 1987, murder of Ember Kimberly Mars.
Three weeks earlier, Young had beat his estranged wife to death in Loogootee, Ind., while on parole for the 1982 suffocation and beating death of his girlfriend in Illinois.