Bank killer's case to be argued in high court

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By ANNA JO BRATTON / The Associated Press

Attorneys for one of the Norfolk bank killers will argue next week that he shouldn’t be sentenced to death because Nebraska didn’t have a valid death penalty law at the time of the crime.

On Sept. 26, 2002, Erick Vela, Jorge Galindo and Jose Sandoval burst into a U.S. Bank branch and killed five people in a botched robbery attempt.

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled three months earlier — on June 24, 2002 — that a jury, not a judge, must weigh whether a killing merits a death sentence or life in prison. In Nebraska, judges had handed down death sentences since the 1970s.

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Jorge Galindo

Jorge Galindo

Nebraska’s death penalty law was changed in November 2002, months after the shooting, and Vela, Galindo and Sandoval were sentenced to death. Accomplice Gabriel Rodriguez was given five consecutive life sentences.

Attorneys appealed, arguing that the new method of sentencing couldn’t apply retroactively, but a judge ruled in 2003 that changes made to the law were procedural only.

That’s one part of Galindo’s appeal to the Nebraska Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in the case Sept. 5.

“The maximum penalty for first-degree murder was life in prison on Sept. 26, 2002, the day the U.S. Bank killings occurred,” according to Galindo’s appeal.

Another section of the appeal is about the electric chair, arguing that it’s cruel and unusual punishment.

But the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in February — after the appeal was filed — that electrocution is cruel and unusual punishment.

That part of the appeal could still be discussed in arguments next week, according to the attorney general’s office. A message left Wednesday for Galindo’s attorneys wasn’t immediately returned.

Electrocution was the state’s only means of execution, and already Vela, who pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder, has asked his sentence be changed from death to life imprisonment, citing the state’s lack of a constitutional method of execution.

The state Supreme Court said repeatedly in its ruling that it did not strike the death penalty — just electrocution as the method.

Gov. Dave Heineman has asked the Nebraska attorney general to look into the possible methods of execution. Lethal injection is the most likely.

Attorneys for Galindo also argue in his appeal that some members of the jury should have been excluded because they had already formed opinions about Galindo’s guilt. And he said his request for a change of venue should have been granted because of the widespread pretrial publicity.

The state said it’s not the amount of publicity, but the type, that’s important.

The reporting was “largely factual,” the state’s response to the appeal said, and “not prejudicial, pervasive, misleading coverage.”

Galindo’s appeal also mentions a case that’s been solved since the court documents were filed. Sandoval pleaded guilty last month to murdering Travis Lundell months before the bank slayings.

Lundell’s murder was linked to Sandoval, Vela, Galindo and Rodriguez during the U.S. Bank investigation. Lundell’s body was found in a shallow grave outside Norfolk in March 2003. He disappeared in August 2002, about a month before the bank murders.

Before Sandoval pleaded guilty no one had been charged in Lundell’s death. But separate juries found Vela and Galindo eligible for the death penalty in part because the jurors believed the evidence showed the two helped kill Lundell, giving their histories of violent crime.

A gruesome photo of Lundell’s body was shown to jurors, Galindo’s attorneys said, although there was no direct physical evidence tying Galindo to Lundell’s death.

But the state’s said Galindo led a sheriff’s deputy to the area where Lundell’s body was found.