Court backs death penalty in tot’s slaying
The Nevada Supreme Court upheld the death penalty sentence Thursday of a former Utah man who pleaded guilty to killing a 3-year-old girl and stabbing her 10-year-old sister nine years ago.
The state high court rejected a plea for a new penalty trial for Beau Maestas, now 28, in the January 2003 carving knife attack that left Kristyanna Cowan dead and Brittney Bergeron paralyzed from the waist down.
Authorities said the attack in a recreational vehicle trailer outside a Mesquite casino was revenge for a drug rip-off involving Maestas and the girls’ mother.
Maestas’ appellate attorney, Tony Sgro, didn’t say Thursday whether he will appeal to federal courts.
Sgro had challenged the constitutionality of one jury deciding Maestas’ fate after a previous jury deadlocked. And in oral arguments before the Supreme Court last October, Sgro alleged that a police dispatcher tainted death penalty deliberations in 2006 when she told other jurors that she heard of convicts going free and committing other crimes.
The court was unanimous. “It is difficult to imagine a more horrendous killing than Kristyanna’s,” Justice Michael Cherry wrote. “But nothing in the record indicates that the jury acted under any improper influence in imposing a death penalty for that killing.”
Prosecutors say Maestas, then 19, and his 16-year-old sister, Monique Maestas, attacked the girls in retaliation for a drug sale rip-off involving the girls’ mother.
Monique Maestas pleaded guilty to the same charges as her brother but wasn’t eligible for the death penalty because of her age. She is now 25 and is serving 47 years to life in prison.