Defense lawyers asked a federal jury Monday to spare the life of a convicted prison killer because he has shown that hope and change are possible in the nearly nine years since he mutilated his victim.
“Rudy Sablan has changed — from using ice picks to pencils, from violence to drawing roses,” said Forrest “Boogie” Lewis, the court-appointed lawyer for Sablan, a federal prison inmate who was convicted last month of the first-degree murder of his cellmate, Joey Jesus Estrella.
The same jury that convicted him of murder is now deliberating whether he should receive the death penalty or a second life sentence in prison.
Sablan, 38, who grew up on Saipan Island in the South Pacific, already is serving life without parole.
Sablan and his cousin, William Sablan, whom a jury convicted last year of the Oct. 10, 1999, murder in a prison cell in the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, eviscerated Estrella, according to evidence in the trial.
One juror held out from giving William Sablan the death penalty, and U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
Lewis argued that Rudy Sablan, who has been convicted of other violent attacks, including stabbing an inmate with an ice pick in the carotid artery in Atlanta in 1996, hasn’t been in trouble since the Estrella incident and has become close to his son, Ervin, who was in the courtroom.
Rudy Sablan has turned to art and sends drawings of roses and shaggy dogs to his son and friends. He also has learned how to knit and has made several gifts for Lewis’ female legal aide.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Brenda Taylor borrowed a phrase from the best-selling book, “Angela’s Ashes,” in which author Frank McCourt described the worst of life’s problems as “beyond beyonds.”
“This indescribable, incomprehensible brutality is beyond description, beyond comprehension,” she told the jury. “It’s ‘beyond beyonds.’ ” She showed the jury slides of Estrella’s bloody body, of his abdominal cavity sliced open and of several organs that were removed.
Lewis countered with a historical reference, describing a slave-ship captain who, after a violent storm in the ocean, stopped transporting slaves and joined the abolitionist movement. The captain, John Newton, eventually wrote the sorrowful, repentant ballad “Amazing Grace.”
“Cases this big leave a legacy. This one will be either death or life; horror and disgust or hope,” Lewis said in closing.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
