Monday, November 22, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Jurors in 1987 case irked by clemency

Pardons Board sees hope for killer given no-parole life term

Jerry Grandlund was frustrated last week after hearing that a murderer he and other jurors sent to prison for life could get out as early as next month.

The state Pardons Board granted "show and tell" murderer Sandy Shaw clemency on Nov. 15, making her eligible for parole though a jury in 1987 sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Grandlund and alternate juror Donald Ireland said they wanted Shaw executed, but state law prohibited the jury from sentencing a 15-year-old to death.

"I don't think the fact she is getting out sucks. What sucks is that people have to go through the ordeal of coming up with that sentence, and then it doesn't mean anything," Grandlund said. "If they don't want to go by what the jury says, let the Legislature come down and do their own sentencing."

Ireland said members of the Pardons Board should have considered the despair felt by the family of murder victim James Cotton Kelly before granting Shaw clemency.

"It's wrong. I don't see why they would let her out," Ireland said. "I felt she showed no remorse, especially going out there and showing people the body. Just the way she did it, I don't think she should be out in society. You know what's right and wrong when you are 15."

The state Pardons Board voted 5-3 to commute Shaw's life sentence, making her eligible for parole at a Parole Board meeting Dec. 17.

Voting for clemency were board Chairman Gov. Kenny Guinn and state Supreme Court Justices Deborah Agosti, Miriam Shearing, Bob Rose and William Maupin. Opposed were Justices Nancy Becker and Mark Gibbons and Attorney General Brian Sandoval.

None of the board members except Guinn returned phone calls last week seeking comment on the board's decision.

Guinn said that clemency is granted very rarely and that it was appropriate in Shaw's case. She was sent to prison when she was 15 and has done a good job of rehabilitating herself since then, he said.

Just because she is eligible for parole doesn't mean she will get out of prison soon, and she can be sent back to prison immediately if she violates parole, Guinn said.

"We give more consideration when they go in at a young age or if the crime wasn't premeditated," Guinn said. "From 15 to 34, she has been in there. We looked at whether there was hope for this lady or whether we should throw away the key. ... I just looked at it and thought, like the majority of the Pardons Board did, she should have a chance to at least go to the Parole Board."

Shaw was sent to prison for the 1986 murder of Kelly. After the state Supreme Court denied her appeal, Shaw petitioned the District Court to reconsider her case on several grounds. Prosecutors and Shaw eventually agreed to a post-conviction stipulation that revised her sentence to life with the possibility of parole.

Without the Pardons Board action last week, Shaw could have applied for parole in 2009.

Shaw and two friends, Troy Kell, then 18, and William Merritt, then 17, lured Kelly to the desert where they robbed the 21-year-old of $1,400 and shot him in the head.

The case was nicknamed the "show and tell" murder because Shaw bragged to friends at Rancho High School and showed them the corpse as it lay in the desert for six days.

"She was proud of it," Ireland said. "There was no remorse to it at all. She had to show it off. And, to me, that is a person who is especially bad."

Kelly's brother, Las Vegas resident George Thiede, said it was unbelievable that the Pardons Board "passed the buck" to the Parole Board to decide whether Shaw will be let out of prison.

"I was so mad that all I could think was that I didn't do enough for my brother," Thiede said. "When you called this morning, I got a knot in my stomach because all I can think is that we shouldn't even be talking about this" because she was given the no-parole sentence in 1987.

District Attorney David Roger, whose office told the Pardons Board that Shaw had violated prison rules 41 times since 1987, said Shaw was especially fortunate.

After she was sentenced, prosecutors in 1995 agreed to make her eligible for parole starting in 2009. Now the Pardons Board has granted her a second benefit by making her immediately eligible for parole.

Roger said the Pardons Board should have discretion to grant clemency in drug and theft cases but added that parameters should be established to restrict the type of murder cases the board may consider.

"When we are talking about rape and murder cases, I don't know that they should have unbridled discretion," Roger said. "The problem is that victims, juries and the entire justice system relies on the jury sentence. ... It seems inherently unfair."

Shaw's attorney, Bill Terry, said clemency was appropriate. She was the youngest woman to be sent to prison in Nevada, and sentencing laws pertaining to accomplices in murder cases were changed after Shaw was sentenced, Terry said.

"The law changed on aiding and abetting sentences," Terry said. "The person has to have absolute knowledge that a gun was going to be used."

Shaw violated prison rules, but she looked after a 16-year-old inmate who was in prison for six years. Also, evidence of Shaw's troubled childhood that might have influenced the jury's sentence never was presented during her trial, Terry said.

Shaw hid in a bathtub when she was 13 in a home where three people were killed. Also, she was walking to school a year later when she witnessed a boy kill a girl.

Nearly half of the cases the Pardons Board considers are presented by the Department of Corrections. But in Shaw's case, Maupin asked the board to listen to Shaw's case because she was scratched from the Pardons Board agenda in January.

Department of Corrections Director Jackie Crawford opposed the move to place Shaw's case on the Nov. 15 agenda, citing her violations of prison rules.

Records for several Pardons Board meetings held between late 1999 and late 2002 show that Shaw was not the only inmate made eligible for parole after a jury ruled they should not be.

At those meetings, the board considered 21 cases involving first- or second-degree murder charges. Of those 21 cases, the clemency requested was denied in seven cases.

In the 11 murder cases in which defendants were serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the board made 10 of the inmates eligible for parole, according to the records.

Phyllis Goldfarb, a Boston College Law School professor who worked on death penalty cases for two decades, suggested that Shaw's age might have played a role in the Pardons Board decision.

In a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers have shown that teenagers' brains are not as developed as the brains of people in their early 20s. Experts think that teens don't exercise the same judgment as a result, Goldfarb said.

Also, society is no longer as eager to punish minors who commit serious crimes, she said.

"The harshest penalties are in less favor now for juveniles than they were in the 1980s," Goldfarb said. "You see that in the trend away from the juvenile death penalty, but it could apply in this instance as well."

Goldfarb said jurors shouldn't feel "ripped off" if the sentence they imposed is reduced years later. Any decision made by a pardons board uses as its starting point the original sentence handed down by the jury, she said.

But Grandlund said the jury's work on the Shaw case was a waste of time, adding that he never again would serve on jury hearing a murder case.

"If they called me, I would tell them they were wasting their time," Grandlund said. "In this case the jury was pretty useless because they (Pardons Board) are not doing what we said."