LINCOLN, Neb.—A Scotts Bluff County man convicted of raping and killing a 15-year-old girl in 2003 while she was on her paper route won’t be leaving death row anytime soon.
The state Supreme Court on Friday denied an appeal from 29-year-old Jeff Hessler, who was sentenced to death more than two years ago for the February 2003 abduction, rape and murder of Heather Guerrero. The girl was delivering newspapers on her morning route in Gering.
The court upheld at least two key portions of the state’s relatively new method of applying death sentences.
Before being convicted of the rape and killing, Hessler also pleaded no contest in 2003 to first-degree sexual assault and was found guilty in the rape of another newspaper carrier, in Scottsbluff. The incident happened six months before Guerrero’s kidnapping and slaying.
Hessler argued to the high court that the district court’s decision to let the jury consider that sexual assault as an aggravating circumstance when considering whether he should be sentenced to death amounted to double jeopardy, or being tried twice for the same offense.
The high court disagreed.
“Because the use of evidence of a prior offense to prove an aggravating circumstance … does not expose the defendant to new jeopardy for the prior offense, such use does not violate the double jeopardy clause,” Judge Lindsey Miller-Lerman wrote in the court opinion.
Aggravating circumstances include factors such as whether a murder was especially heinous, cruel or depraved or whether it was committed for monetary gain.
The state’s new sentencing process was enacted in 2002 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries, not judges, must decide whether aggravating circumstances exist to merit the death penalty.
A three-judge panel then passes sentence.
Another aspect of the sentencing procedure upheld Friday deals with how juries conclude that aggravating circumstances exist. Hessler argued that the district court was wrong to deny his request that the jury make unanimous, written findings of fact to support each aggravator it believed existed.
Lacking that information, he argued, three-judge sentencing panels are not adequately familiar with facts to weigh whether the aggravators are sufficient for a death sentence.
But the high court said statutes don’t require that and the district court fulfilled its obligations. It instructed the jury that it needed to unanimously agree, beyond a reasonable doubt, that each aggravating circumstance was true.
James Mowbray, Hessler’s attorney and chief counsel for the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, would not comment on the decision and what, if any, legal steps Hessler may take.
“I need to talk to my client,” he said Friday.
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