WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court docket is leaving in place the sentence of a girl on dying row in Alabama who helped her boyfriend kill his two younger youngsters.
The excessive court docket on Monday rejected an attraction from legal professionals for Heather Leavell-Keaton. As is typical, the court docket rejected the case with out remark.
Leavell-Keaton was convicted of homicide within the dying of 3-year-old Chase DeBlase and manslaughter within the dying of his sister, 4-year-old Natalie DeBlase. Prosecutors mentioned she poisoned the kids with antifreeze. There was additionally proof the kids’s father, John DeBlase, strangled them. The youngsters’s stays have been discovered within the woods in Alabama and Mississippi.
Leavell-Keaton was initially sentenced to dying in 2015. A brand new sentencing listening to was ordered, nevertheless, after a court docket discovered that the decide who sentenced Leavell-Keaton to dying erred by failing to offer her an opportunity to talk on her personal behalf earlier than sentencing. She was sentenced to dying once more in 2021.
Leavell-Keaton ‘s legal professionals argued of their petition to the Supreme Court docket that at the newest sentencing listening to she ought to have been given the chance to current proof of her good conduct in jail between 2015 and 2021.
Leavell-Keaton is considered one of 5 ladies on dying row in Alabama.
John DeBlase was additionally convicted within the dying of the kids in a separate trial and sentenced to dying. He stays on dying row.