Jurors who had watched a video of a federal prison inmate gloating over the bloody corpse of his cellmate convicted the man of first-degree murder today in U.S. District Court.
Now, the same jurors who returned guilty verdicts will decide whether William Sablan, 43, should be put to death for murdering Joey Estrella in 1999 at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary in Florence.
Sablan did not react when the verdict was read this morning.
“I think justice is done,” U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said following the verdict.
Defense attorneys in the case declined to comment. During the trial, they portrayed Sablan as mentally impaired. Prosecutors, however, said Sablan had boasted of faking mental illness in the past to evade punishment.
The seven-woman, five-man jury began deliberations Monday.
Following the verdict announcement, U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel scheduled the penalty phase of the trial to begin Monday. According to prosecutors and defense attorneys, this phase will last up to four weeks.
No one has been sentenced to death in Colorado’s federal courts since Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a decade ago.
Evidence not permitted in the guilt phase of a federal trial can be admitted during the penalty phase, including additional details about a defendant’s mental health, said David Bruck, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. and a member of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel.
“Everything good or bad about a person is allowed,” he said. “The defendant has an unlimited right to show why he should not get the death penalty.”
Sablan and his cousin, Rudy Sablan, were sharing a cell at the high-security penitentiary when Estrella was killed.
A video shot by jailers through a cell-door window showed Estrella’s body on the cell floor as William Sablan – his white boxer shorts and T-shirt soaked with blood – shouted obscenities and boasted about killing Estrella.
The 20-minute video captured William Sablan slapping the corpse in the face, sitting on his chest and sticking a lit cigarette in the dead man’s mouth.
In the trial, defense attorneys said William Sablan suffered severe head injuries during the 1990s, including a head-first fall from a 20-foot rooftop.
They also raised the issue that prison officials put three men – the Sablans and Estrella – into a special cell designed for two, and that the prisoners had access to homemade wine before the murder.
About a third of people who enter the penalty phase of a federal first-degree murder trial get the death penalty, Bruck said.
If a single juror votes for a sentence of life in prison without parole, the judge must impose a life sentence, he said.
Rudy Sablan’s trial will begin after his cousin’s trial is completed.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
