DENVER-
A federal prosecutor asked jurors Monday to reject the mental-illness defense of a prison inmate facing the death penalty for allegedly killing his cellmate and using his entrails to taunt guards and other inmates in 1999.
Jurors began deliberating the first-degree murder case against William Sablan, 32. He and his cousin, Rudy Sablan, 47, who was also in the cell when Joey Jesus Estrella was killed, are the first federal defendants in Colorado to face the death penalty since Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Rudy Sablan also faces a first-degree murder charge. His trial date has not been set.
The defense argued that brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder made William Sablan unable to control his impulses and deliberately kill Estrella, 33.
Prosecutor Brenda Taylor disputed that. She said the cousins killed Estrella in hopes of winning other inmates’ respect and planned to tell investigators they acted in self-defense.
She said William Sablan told prosecutors before he was indicted that he had “beaten” other cases with a mental-illness defense and would beat this one with the same defense.
Expert defense witnesses had testified William Sablan suffered at least two falls and a machete attack that left him brain-damaged and incapable of premeditated murder.
Defense attorney Nathan Chambers also blamed prison guards for lapses that allowed the inmates access to homemade wine, for placing three men—including William Sablan, who had a history of violent crime—in a cell designed for two and for failing to respond to an alarm button pushed in the cell.
Early in the trial, which began with jury selection in January, prosecutors showed jurors a videotape shot by prison guards after they saw the carnage inside the cell. The tape showed William Sablan holding up Estrella’s internal organs and making obscene gestures. Blood flowed under the door of the cell, and an “S,” Sablan’s second initial, was written in blood on the cell wall.
A disposable razor believed to have been used in the crime was sitting next to Estrella’s body early in the video, but was missing later. It was never found.
Taylor told jurors that the cousins, who are from Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, were heard on the tape speaking in English and Chamorro, their native language.
At one point, she said, Rudy Sablan tells William Sablan to block the guards’ view so he could flush the razor down the toilet.
William Sablan was seen ranting on the tape before he calmly asks his cousin in Chamorro: “Done?” Taylor said.
“Could there be any more deliberate conversation?” Taylor asked the jurors.
If the seven-woman, five-man jury convicts Sablan of first-degree murder, the same jury would deliberate after a sentencing trial to determine whether he should be executed. A guilty verdict on a lesser crime would turn over the sentencing decision to U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel.
