Last-minute motion delays convicted murderer’s sentencing
A judge on Tuesday delayed the sentencing of a man convicted in the 2008 murders of his sixth wife and a hit man he hired after the defense filed a last-minute, 700-page motion to dismiss the charges.
District Judge Tierra Jones was set to impose a sentence on Thomas Randolph, who was found guilty by a jury in August of killing his wife, Sharon Causse Randolph, and handyman Michael Miller at Randolph’s Las Vegas home on May 8, 2008.
But Jones revealed in court that the defense had filed a motion at 4:59 p.m. Monday, asking her to dismiss the murder conspiracy and first-degree murder charges on which the jury convicted the 68-year-old Randolph.
Jones said she was legally obligated to consider the motion and asked prosecutors to respond by Dec. 11 and for the defense to provide a reply to the response by Dec. 18.
She set a new sentencing hearing for Randolph for Jan. 4.
The defense motion, filed by Randolph’s attorneys Christopher Oram and Joshua Tomsheck, amounted to more than 700 pages, including a rambling and at times illegible handwritten argument penned by Randolph himself, according to court records.
The lawyers argued that the murder and conspiracy charges from his 2017 trial should be thrown out because of lengthy case delays, the deaths of Randolph’s four previous defense lawyers and several defense witnesses, as well as health and other issues preventing other witnesses from testifying, irreparably damaged his constitutional right to a fair trial.
In the trial, prosecutors alleged that Randolph, seeking to collect $300,000 on a life insurance policy, hired Miller, his handyman, to kill Sharon Randolph, Randolph’s sixth wife.
The state argued that when Randolph and his wife returned home from a date on May 8, 2008, Miller fatally shot her in the head, but then Randolph double-crossed Miller by shooting him to death at the scene and claiming to Las Vegas police that Miller was a masked intruder who shot his wife.
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on X.
