YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!
Killer loses his appeal over death penalty
A MAN sentenced to death for the killing and dismemberment of a woman he lured to her death through a dating app, has lost his latest appeal.
Aubrey Trail slit his own throat in the dock during his trial and had argued that his bloody act robbed him of a fair hearing.
But the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected the 56-year-old’s appeal.
He was found guilty of the 2017 murder of Sydney Loofe, 24, and sentenced to death last year.
Trail’s girlfriend at the time, Bailey Boswell, was also convicted as an active participant in Sydney’s death and sentenced last November to life in prison.
Trail’s claims also included the arguments that the judge should have declared a mistrial, or later, granted a request for a new trial, after Trail disrupted the third day of his trial by yelling: “Bailey is innocent, and I curse you all!” before cutting his own throat with a razor blade he had obtained in jail and sneaked into the courtroom.
In denying Trail’s motions for a mistrial or new trial, the district court found that Trail’s act of self-harm was “a calculating gesture”.
The state’s high court said it would not second-guess the trial court’s decision in the matter.
The Supreme Court cited other appeals court cases that also ruled against defendants who had disrupted their own court hearings, saying that to allow mistrials in such cases “would provide a criminal defendant with a convenient device for provoking a mistrial whenever he chose to do so”.
“As with these other defendants, we will not permit Trail to benefit from his own bad behaviour during trial,” Justice John Freudenberg wrote for the court in its unanimous ruling.
Prosecutors said Trail and Boswell planned the abduction and killing of Sydney, whom Boswell met using the online dating app Tinder. Two days after Boswell and Sydney met for a date on November 14, 2017, her mother reported her missing.
Sydney’s dismembered remains were found weeks later, stuffed into rubbish bags that had been dumped in a field near Edgar, Nebraska.