Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, is seeking an execution date for a convicted murderer who has been on death row for 30 years, but his attorney says the request is premature because the man has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. What do you intend to do?
Charles Ray Crawford, 58, was sentenced to death for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 20-year-old community college student Christy Ray. Associated Press.
During his 1994 trial, jurors cited past rape convictions when they sentenced Crawford, but his attorneys said Monday they would appeal the conviction to the Supreme Court. When the lower court’s verdict was pronounced against him last week.
Crawford was arrested the day Ray was abducted from his parents’ home and stabbed to death in Tippah County. Crawford told officers he blacked out and didn’t remember hitting her.
Mississippi death row inmate Charles Ray Crawford, who was sentenced to death in 1994 for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 20-year-old Christy Ray, a community college student. (Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP)
He was arrested days before his scheduled trial for assaulting another woman by hitting her on the head with a hammer.
The trial on the assault charge was adjourned several months before he was sentenced. In a separate trial, Crawford was found guilty of raping a 17-year-old girl who was friends with the victim of the hammer attack. The victims were at the same place at the time of the attack.
Crawford said he also blacked out during the incidents and did not remember being assaulted with a hammer or being raped.
During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial in Ray’s death, jurors Punishment for rape for being a “disturbing situation” and sentenced him to death, according to court records.
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During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial, jurors called his prior rape conviction an “aggravating circumstance” and sentenced him to death. (iStock)
In his latest federal appeal of the rape case, Crawford claimed that his former attorneys provided an unconstitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel for the insanity defense. He underwent a mental evaluation at a state hospital, but court records show the trial judge repeatedly refused to allow a psychiatrist or a mental health professional outside the state to assist in Crawford’s defense. Refused.
On Friday, a majority of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Crawford’s appeal.
But the dissenting judges wrote that he won an “inadequately prepared and presented insanity defense” and that “it took years for a qualified physician to fully evaluate Crawford.” The dissenting justices cited Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, a neurologist who examined Crawford.
“Charles was laboring under such an impairment due to his seizure disorder that he could not understand the nature and quality of his actions at the time of the crime,” Nadkarni wrote. “He is a mentally injured man (confirmed by both the history and his neurological examination) who was essentially absent in any useful sense due to an epileptic fit at the time of the crime.”
The picture shows the gurney of the execution chamber. (AP Photo/Sev Ogroki, File)
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Crawford’s case has already been appealed several times using different arguments, which are common in death penalty cases.
Hours after a federal appeals court rejected Crawford’s latest appeal, Fitch filed documents urging the state Supreme Court to set a date for Crawford’s execution by lethal injection, claiming “He has exhausted all state and federal remedies.”
However, attorneys representing Crawford in the Mississippi office of the Post-Conviction Council filed documents Monday that they plan to ask him. US Supreme Court To set aside the judgment of the Court of Appeal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.