No new trial for Preston Strong
Four years after he was sentenced to death for the 2005 La Mesa Street murders, Preston Strong’s conviction was affirmed earlier this month by a Yuma County Superior Court judge.
On April 9, Superior Court Judge Brandon Kinsey denied Strong’s motions in their entirety to vacate judgment and for a new trial, which were based on allegations of jury misconduct.
“Since there is no misconduct by any juror in this case, the court does not need to determine whether there was any prejudice to Strong,” Kinsey wrote in his eight-page ruling.
Strong was convicted on
April 25, 2017, of six counts of first-degree murder following a 47-day trial in the deaths of 35-year-old Luis Rios, 29-year-old Adrienne Heredia, and her four children – 13-year-old Andres Crawford, 12-year-old Enrique Bedoya, 9-year-old Inez Newman and 6-yearold Danny Heredia.
The same jury that convicted Strong later determined that he should receive the death penalty, and on May 5 of that same year then-Superior Court Judge Maria Elena Cruz sentenced him to die by lethal injection.
Strong appealed his conviction, claiming that juror misconduct and a juror’s knowledge of his prior murder conviction deprived him of his constitutional right to a fair trial.
The Arizona Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Yuma County Superior Court to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine if the allegations contained in Strong’s motions did indeed have an effect on the verdict.
That evidentiary hearing was held over the course of four days: Dec. 7, 2020, Dec. 14, 2020, Jan. 4, 2021 and Feb. 8. 2021. While Strong attended the two hearings in December, he chose to appear telephonically at the January and February hearings.
At the Dec. 7, 2020 hearing, a juror testified that during the trial she overheard another juror say something about the death of a doctor, adding that she didn’t know what was being said.
She also testified that she didn’t remember there being any discussions about Strong’s previous murder convictions when the jury was deciding whether to impose the death sentence on Strong.
The juror who was overheard making the remarks was also called to the stand and she testified that she knew that Strong had been convicted of the 2007 murder of Dr. Satinder Gill, but she had forgotten about it until the last day of the trial.
Almost 10 years had passed between the Gill murder and the start of the trial in the La Mesa Street murders, and more than four years since Strong had been convicted of it.
Kinsey wrote in his ruling that the remaining witnesses who were called during the hearings, which included Strong’s trial attorneys and private investigators, were either vague as to the details of any conversations they may have had with the juror, or were not specific enough to dispute her own memory of Strong’s previous murder conviction.
In denying Strong’s motion, Kinsey wrote that the court could not find that any jury misconduct had been committed.
“In general, this court perceived that each of the witnesses who testified during the hearing did so to the best of their ability and this court did not perceive any intention to deceive the court from any of the witnesses,” Kinsey wrote.
Multiple hearings were held to follow COVID protocols and to accommodate the witnesses, parties, and the court’s schedule.