El Toro Marine to Be Resentenced

A military court has set aside the death sentence of a former El Toro Marine convicted of killing his pregnant wife in their apartment on the base.

Sgt. Joseph L. Thomas was on death row at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., when the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled that the trial judge improperly told the jury to vote on a death sentence before considering lesser penalties, the Navy Times reported.

Military justice rules require that juries first consider the least severe sentences in capital cases.

Thomas was convicted in November 1988 of bludgeoning his wife in their water bed the previous December to collect $50,000 in life insurance. Thomas’ admitted accomplice, Lance Cpl. MitchaelNelson, testified in exchange for immunity that he and Thomas then belted the body into the driver’s seat of the couple’s Suzuki Samurai, pushed it off a remote cliff beside Ortega Highway near the Riverside County line, then set the car ablaze.

A lower appeals court recognized the judge’s mistake but upheld the death sentence, saying the error didn’t affect the fairness of the sentence. The Navy Judge Advocate General will now form a new jury to rehear the sentencing phase of Thomas’ trial. That jury could still hand down a death sentence, which would ultimately have to be approved by the president.

The last military execution was in 1961, when the Army hanged Pvt. John A. Bennett for raping an 11-year-old Austrian girl.