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Rodriguez's appeals likely to last for years
By BLAKE NICHOLSON Associated Press Writer FARGO, N.D. Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. has become the 45th federal prisoner on death row in the United States, but it is unlikely his life will end anytime soon.
Rodriguez was sentenced to death on Friday in the killing of University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin. Defense attorney Richard Ney said he will first file a motion for a new trial and if that is denied, he will appeal.
Based on history, that means it is likely to be at least half a dozen years before Rodriguez is given a lethal injection in a federal prison at Terre Haute, Ind., if his appeals are unsuccessful.
Three federal prisoners have been put to death in the past five years. In two of the cases, the time between sentencing and execution was eight years; in the other case it was about six years, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.
The average length of the appeal process in all death penalty cases in the United States state and federal is a little over 10 years, Dieter said.
If you get the death penalty, appeals are numerous, he said.
Michael Radelet, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Colorado, has studied the death penalty for 25 years. He said appeals are lengthy primarily because it takes defendants so long to get their day in court.
Some would argue the system is collapsing under its own weight, he said.
Dieter said that statistically, Rodriguezs death sentence defies the odds. In the previous 161 federal death penalty cases that have gone to trial in the past two decades, the federal government has only been getting death sentences in about a third of cases, he said.
In state cases, a death sentence is imposed more often, Dieter said. One reason, he said, is that a unanimous verdict is required in federal courts while it is not required in some states, and federal cases tend to have better representation and defense resources.
Representation is better because the federal court system pays better, and because of the existence of a federal death penalty resource council to assist in the choosing of defense attorneys, Dieter said.
Youre not going to get someone whos never tried (a death penalty case) before, he said.
North Dakota does not have the death penalty. Rodriguez, 53, faced capital punishment in federal court in Fargo because authorities said he crossed state lines after kidnapping Sjodin.
Radelet said appeals typically are handled by attorneys different than those who handled the trial, so that new attorneys can inspect the work that the initial attorneys did to see if theres anything problematic.
Every attorney worth her Bar card, when it comes to appeal, is going to raise every conceivable issue, he said. Every case really has its own story to tell.
In a death penalty appeal, Radelet said, there also are more standard grounds for appeal such as the argument that the death penalty is unusual punishment.
The odds of that prevailing are quite small, he said.
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