CENTENNIAL, Colo.—Arapahoe County jurors have sentenced 23-year-old Robert Ray to die for the shooting death of a man who was going to testify against him in another murder case.
Jurors reached the decision on Monday.
Ray was convicted last month on two counts of first-degree murder in the 2005 deaths of Vivian Wolfe and Javad Marshall-Fields in Aurora. Fields was going to testify against Ray.
Jurors decided on a life sentence for Ray for killing Wolfe.
Prosecutors said Ray “forfeited his right to live” and should be executed as a deterrent against killing other trial witnesses.
Defense witnesses told jurors that Ray, who masterminded the slaying, had a violent upbringing in Chicago and saw at least three people get killed by the time he was 7.
Ray had asked jurors for a life sentence.
Ray is the second person sentenced to death in the double-slaying. Sir Mario Owens was convicted in May 2008 and sentenced last year.
A trial for a third suspect, Parish Carter, is pending.
Both Owens and Ray are also serving decades-long sentences in the July 4, 2004, slaying of Gregory Vann in an Aurora park, the original case in which Marshall-Fields was to testify. Owens was convicted of first-degree murder in that case and was sentenced in 2007 to life in prison without parole, with an additional 64 years for an attempted murder conviction. Ray was convicted of being an accessory to Vann’s murder and was sentenced in 2007 to 108 years in prison.
Ray’s death sentence will bring to three the number of people on Colorado’s death row. Ray will join Owens and Nathan Dunlap, now 35, who was convicted in the 1993 slaying of four people at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Aurora. A fifth shooting victim survived.
The last execution in Colorado was in 1997, when 53-year-old Gary Lee Davis was put to death for his conviction in a 1986 slaying.
