Scuba killer Gabe Watson faces death sentence
Gabe Watson killed wife Tina while diving
Out of Australian jail next year
US officials will seek death penalty
Out of Australian jail next year
US officials will seek death penalty
HONEYMOON killer Gabe Watson could face the death penalty when he is released from an Australian jail and returns to the US.Alabama Attorney General Troy King yesterday announced he would go after Watson for a capital murder, the worst category of murder in the state.
If he is convicted, Watson faces death by lethal injection or life without parole.
The 32-year-old bubble-wrap salesman has admitted to killing his new wife Tina Watson who drowned as they explored the Great Barrier Reef on their October 2003 honeymoon.
In June, he cut a deal with Queensland prosecutors and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
He was sentenced to 4 1/2 years' jail, to be suspended after a year, in a decision that devastated Tina's family and provoked public outcry over its leniency.
Queensland Attorney General Cameron Dick appealed the sentence and the Court of Appeal on Friday ruled Watson should spend another six months in jail, which means he will be back in Alabama in December 2010.
Mr King said he was "deeply disappointed" by the outcome.
"Tina Thomas Watson and her family have been deprived by the Australian court system of the justice they deserved," Mr King said.
Mr King had been considering hitting Watson with a murder conspiracy charge, but yesterday declared he would go for the more serious offence.
During a meeting yesterday, he ordered a team of prosecutors and investigators to compile a brief of evidence that will be presented to a grand jury for a capital murder indictment.
The presentation could happen within months.
If the 16-person panel agrees there is enough evidence to support a conviction in Alabama, he will be tried for murder. If convicted, a judge would decide whether to give him life in jail or condemn him to death.
Mr King said he hoped to give the family "what they could not get in Australia - justice".
But legal experts have expressed doubts that Watson could be retried due to double jeopardy rules. LinkHere
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 8:38 PM
2 Comments:
The sentence he received was dismal and I can't imagine how devastated her parents are, however the problem with this plan is that Australia does not extrodite for charges that may receive the death penality. So if Mr Watson should be charged in an Alabama court for a crime he has already been found guilty for, and that crime attracts the penality of death, he may be able to stay in Australia. A better solution ( because we do not wish to support his man for more than then we have already, re: the cost of the trial and the amount it costs to keep a man in prison,) would be to wave the posibility of the death penalty and he would be put on a plane the day he leaves prison. What happens to him then, is up to the American courts. At the last I imagine a civil case.
Exactly, death penalty on the table, they have already lost.
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