NV Supreme Court vacates death sentence

— The Nevada Supreme Court has vacated the death sentence and ordered a new penalty hearing for a Las Vegas man convicted of fatally shooting a cabdriver during a 1990 robbery.

In an unanimous ruling, justices said "aggravators" used by a three-judge panel to impose the death penalty against Frederick Paine were invalid.

"Therefore, Paine is not eligible for the death penalty and his sentence of death must be vacated," Chief Justice James Hardesty wrote for the court in the opinion issued late Tuesday.

The case was remanded to Clark County District Court, where Paine, now 39, likely will be sentenced to life in prison.

Paine was 19 when he robbed Kenneth Marcum of $45 and shot him in the head.

He was originally sentenced to die by a three-judge panel, but that sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court because one panel judge apparently fell asleep during the proceedings.

A second panel imposed the death penalty again, and the sentence was twice upheld by the Supreme Court.

Justices in Tuesday's opinion said the court has since overruled previous legal findings it relied on to affirm the sentence in its earlier rulings.

In separate rulings, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalties of two other inmates, James Chappell and William Witter, both of Las Vegas.

William Witter, 46, was sentenced to die for the 1993 killing of James Cox, who was stabbed in a hotel parking garage when he arrived to pick up his wife from work and interrupted Witter trying to sexually assault her.

Chappell was sentenced to death for beating, raping and stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend and mother of his three children in Las Vegas after he was mistakenly released from jail in 1995.

A first death sentenced was overturned in 2000, but Chappell, 39, was again sentenced to death after a second penalty hearing.


