By Rene Romo
Albuquerque Journal
LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Larry Lujan, 33, will get a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of a San Antonio, Texas, youth after a federal jury failed Wednesday to reach a unanimous decision on whether to impose the death penalty.
The jury began deliberations on the penalty phase Tuesday afternoon following the threemonth trial, and unanimity was required among the 12 jurors in order to sentence Lujan to death. Sentencing has not been scheduled.
The jury was not publicly polled and neither prosecutors nor public defender Robert Kinney would reveal what jurors told them in interviews. But one juror, who identified himself as the foreman while declining to provide his name, said a majority leaned toward the death penalty.
Kinney called the result a “great victory” in a case in which prosecutors portrayed Lujan as a man lacking a conscience who cruelly tormented his weaker victim over nearly two days before stabbing and nearly beheading him.
The jury in September found Lujan, a Chamberino native who had moved to San Antonio, Texas, guilty of the March 2005 kidnapping and fatal stabbing of 16-year-old Dana Joseph Grauke, whose body was found along an irrigation canal in southern Doña Ana County.
In a separate case, Lujan still faces trial on first-degree murder charges for allegedly killing a Chamberino couple in their home in 1998 and then trying to set fire to the house.
Federal prosecutors told jurors who were considering Lujan’s sentence that his history of violence, including the three homicides for which he has been charged and at least five fights inside the Doña Ana County Detention Center while awaiting trial, showed Lujan represented a continuing danger to others. Lujan’s was the first federal death penalty case in New Mexico that has gone to a jury.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Maria Armijo and Mark Saltman said they accepted the jury’s decision.
“It’s always left up to the jury to decide what to do,” Armijo said. “And that’s what the whole process is about. You have to believe in the process.”
Prosecutors urged jurors to give Lujan the ultimate penalty for Grauke’s slaying because, they said, the defendant showed a low potential for rehabilitation - and no remorse.
Prosecutors said Lujan and several other youths broke into Grauke’s home on March 7, 2005, ransacked it and beat Grauke in an attempt to force the youth to pay a $600 “tax” for selling marijuana and other drugs in a San Antonio neighborhood that Lujan considered his territory.
Defense attorney Peter Schoenburg recounted the troubles the defendant faced as a child: a drug-addicted mother who sold heroin out of their Chamberino home; an older brother who raped Lujan when he was 7 or 8; witnessing family members arrested dozens of times before Lujan was 18.
“Circumstances beyond his control really damaged his (Lujan’s) ability to make good decisions,” he told the jury.
At another point, Schoenburg said: “Larry would have been better off raised by wolves.”
Copyright 2011 Albuquerque Journal