DENVER—Colorado’s Solicitor General Dan Domenico will be in Washington next week to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Domenico will represent the state in a case involving a state inmate who’s challenging his convictions in the slaying of an assistant manager at a pizza shop in 1986. Federal assistant public defender, Kathleen Lord, is representing the inmate.
The AG’s office says the state last argued before the Supreme Court in 2008 when Attorney General John Suthers presented Colorado’s case in a water dispute with Kansas. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Colorado’s favor in that case.
Patrick Wood is challenging his conviction of second-degree murder and felony murder in the death of Matthew Sparks. Wood claims that the two convictions for the same crime amount to double-jeopardy, the Constitutional protection that one can’t be tried twice for the same crime.
At issue is a narrow legal question surrounding the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissal of Wood’s claim as being filed too late.
Lord, who’s been involved in several high profile Colorado cases, including the 2005 overturning of a death sentence for a man based on jurors’ use of Bible verses during deliberations, argues that the court shouldn’t have considered whether the statute of limitations had expired for an appeal. She argued that the state hadn’t raised the issue before it showed up in the appellate court.
Domenico, a former assistant solicitor for the U.S. Department of the Interior who became Colorado’s solicitor general in 2006, argued that the state never gave up its right to challenge the timeliness of Wood’s appeal. In legal briefs, Domenico argues that federal law, mainly the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, places a time limit on when an inmate can appeal in order to give “finality” to court cases.
