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U.S. judge to sentence Massachusetts
triple murderer to death
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 [February 03, 2017]
BOSTON (Reuters) - A Massachusetts
man who admitted to killing three people in a 2001 rampage is due to be
sentenced to death by a federal judge on Friday, making him the second
person to face a capital sentence in the state in two years.
A former drifter and bank robber, Gary Lee Sampson, 57, surrendered to
police after his killing spree in Massachusetts and neighboring New
Hampshire. He first stabbed his victims and later shifted tactics to
strangling them because, he said, he had tired of getting blood on
himself.
Sampson was first condemned to death in a Boston federal court in 2004.
But that sentence was overturned in 2011 after a judge learned that one
of the jurors on the case had lied about her history as a victim of
domestic abuse.
A second jury voted to condemn Sampson last month, following a two-month
sentencing trial during which jurors saw the weapons he used and heard
tapes of him admitting the killings to police, including saying that
after murdering his last victim, he "cooked some breakfast while he was
dead in the bathroom."
Family members of some of Sampson's three victims - Philip McCloskey,
69, Jonathan Rizzo, 19, and Robert Whitney, 58 - are expected to speak
at Friday's hearing, where U.S. District Judge Leo Sorkin will sentence
him to die by lethal injection.
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Massachusetts state laws do not allow for the death penalty as a
punishment, but Sampson was tried in federal court because his
killings began with carjackings, a federal crime.
The sentence applies to just the murders of McCloskey and Rizzo, who
were killed in Massachusetts.
It is a rarity to see two death penalty cases in liberal-leaning
Massachusetts within a two-year period. Convicted Boston Marathon
bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in May 2015.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Dan Grebler)
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