Defense wants Lambing trial moved
Pursuing of the death penalty against Keith Jordan Lambing, who is accused of killing a 4-year-old boy, is unconstitutional, the man’s defense attorney said in court filings — and any jury trial conducted in Butler would be unfairly slanted against the defense.
In a motion filed Friday, Public Defender Charles Nedz made several demands and questioned evidence in the state’s case against Lambing.
Butler District Attorney Richard Goldinger is pursuing the death penalty against Lambing, who’s accused of sodomizing Bentley Thomas Miller on March 21, 2017, so brutally that the child bled to death from resulting internal and external wounds.
But in the motion filed by Lambing’s defense, the defense attorney argued that the death penalty “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” that violates the Eighth Amendment and that it “offends the evolving standards of decency.”
“Capital decisions are very difficult to make. It’s not a coin toss decision,” said John Rago, a criminal law professor at Duquesne University who has no connection to Lambing’s case. “The government has a right, not an obligation, to look into whether the death penalty should be pursued.”
Lambing faces one felony count each of criminal homicide, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with serious bodily injury, rape of a child, rape of a child with serious bodily injury, aggravated indecent assault of a child, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of children, and one misdemeanor count of recklessly endangering another person. Much of Friday’s motion was filed in response to a preliminary hearing that was held April 26.
During that hearing, Dr. Todd Luckasevic of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office testified that an autopsy determined Bentley died from blood loss after suffering a sexual assault that left him with external and internal injuries.
According to court documents, Bentley was pronounced dead at 10:15 a.m. on March 21, 2017, at Butler Memorial Hospital, where he was taken after losing consciousness in the car of Lambing’s mother, Kristen Herold, after she picked him up from the Super 8 Motel that morning.
Prosecutors also sought to draw a link between Bentley’s fatal injuries and Lambing, with Detective Thomas Vensel of Butler Township police testifying that police interviews with Lambing, Herold, and Mac-Kenzie Paige Peters, who is Bentley’s mother, determined Lambing was the only adult in the room at the time of the assault.
The latest court filing calls into question the state’s conclusion that Bentley was penetrated based on evidence presented at the hearing and bemoans the decision to release Bentley’s body. After the boy’s body was released, the defense claims that Peters had her son’s body cremated just six days later.
“The Commonwealth’s release of such critical evidence is unconscionable,” Nedz concludes in the motion.
Lambing’s defense notes that in order for someone to be charged and convicted of first-degree murder, it must be proven that a murder was premeditated and deliberate, among other things. Lambing’s defense argues that “there was simply no evidence presented” at the preliminary hearing that proves this was the case with Lambing and that the “absence of evidence regarding the Defendant’s state of mind and intent is fatal to the charge of First Degree Murder.”
“The evidence is probably sufficient if the government came to this decision,” Rago said about the case in general and also about the child’s cremation. “I can’t imagine the DA would make a decision this significant without collecting all the evidence they needed.”
Another significant demand made in Friday’s filing is that President Judge Thomas Doerr be removed from presiding over the case because, they argue, he is biased against Lambing over all the search warrants he signed for investigators to search the motel room, among other searches they conducted. Doerr also presided over previous cases against Lambing in Juvenile Court, which further biases him against Lambing.
But even more importantly, Lambing’s defense team requested that the impending trial be moved outside of the county, citing a flood of media attention “slanted towards conviction from the inception of this case.”
Citing stories in the Butler Eagle and other news media outlets, they claim that “such headlines and news stories were sensational, inflammatory, and slanted towards conviction rather than factual and objective, inasmuch as the Commonwealth’s accusations of rape are unfounded to this point.”
