BOISE, Idaho — It’s been 30 years since Robin Lee Row, Idaho’s only current female death row inmate, killed her two children and husband and then set her family duplex on fire, later drudging through a long appeal process, post-conviction relief and multiple supreme court denials – but she’s trying one more time to get off death row.
Row and her attorneys filed a post-conviction petition at the state level on June 29 of this year, requesting she get an evidentiary hearing and a vacated death sentence that was handed down to her by a judge in December of 1993.
Row has tried for three decades to seek some sort of change to her sentence. A fourth post-conviction relief attempt was denied in 2008.
Her newly-filed petition is based on a recent U.S Supreme Court ruling and what her defense says is ineffectiveness of counsel from failure to bring forth evidence of a brain atrophy.
Reasons to file
Row’s defense is reasoning that because of a recent U.S Supreme Court ruling, Shinn v. Ramirez, it is now appropriate and timely to “set the clock running” for a new state post-conviction claim.
The U.S Supreme Court’s decision in May of this year held that federal courts should be confined by the evidence from prior state proceedings, regardless of whether the prisoner had the representation of an effective or ineffective lawyer for trial or post-conviction appeals.
If certain claims of ineffective counsel are not developed in state court first, federal courts can no longer address them, the Supreme Court held in the 6-3 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.
The prosecution in Row's murder trial painted her as a cold, merciless killer, but she was actually brain damaged and had many issues with decision-making, her defense said in a 93-page petition for post-conviction relief.
The brain atrophy that the defense says Row has had since birth, getting worse with time, was not brought up by any of her defense counsel during trial even though her attorneys at the time knew about the neurological issues, the petition said.
Row has used this defense before in her appeals to the state, which were denied by the Idaho Supreme Court. However, she can bring up these same claims in a post-conviction petition for relief, which is not limited to a previous court record like appeals are.
Essentially, this petition following the recent decision of the U.S Supreme Court is establishing claims in a lower court first so it can be later discussed in a federal proceeding.
After a U.S Supreme Court ruling, petitioners have 42 days to file their claims. The clock began ticking on May 23.
The murders
Early in the morning on Feb.10, 1992, residents on Seneca Street in Boise awoke to the sounds of blaring fire trucks and police sirens.
Part of a duplex on the corner of Five Mile Road was surrounded in flames and billowing clouds of smoke.
Row’s husband, Randy, and Row's two children, Tabitha Cornellier, 8, and Joshua Cornellier, 10, were found dead inside the home of carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Associated Press archives.
Row was not at the residence at the time, but rather staying at a friend’s house. She had awoken her friend she was staying with, Joan McHugh, saying something was “wrong with her house.” When the two arrived at the duplex, Row was told her family had perished.
Fire investigators later said that they believed someone intentionally set the fire.
The flames were exacerbated with petroleum, the breaker for the smoke detectors in the home was turned off and a fan was running, which was believed to have circulated the smoke throughout the house, the Associated Press reported.
Vaughn Killeen, who was Ada County Sheriff at the time, told the press that year that he would be charging Row with arson and homicide after an investigation that set their sights on her past.
Killeen said that Row lost another child in 1980 in what he described as a “suspicious fire” in California and an infant who possibly died of sudden infant death syndrome. A shelter Row worked at was also partly destroyed by a fire when she was working there, but investigators could not confirm if she was involved.
While Row was being held in the Ada County Jail after being charged with homicide and arson, investigators said she began making phone calls to her friend McHugh, which were then recorded.
In the trial, investigators said they discovered Row had taken out life insurance policies on her family three weeks before their deaths which raised eyebrows.
“This was probably the most premeditated, in some ways, premeditated-for-gain murders that I've seen,” former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney previously told KTVB.
A federal judge who later dismissed one of Row’s appeals noted that there was plenty of overwhelming and powerful circumstantial evidence in the homicides of the three family members.
When Row was sentenced to die in 1993, Judge Alan Schwartzman called her “the embodiment of a cold-blooded, pitiless slayer.”
The claims
Row’s defense says she is pursuing this claim based on ineffectiveness of counsel, not on innocence – because her defense failed to bring forth mitigation evidence of a brain atrophy and tumultuous childhood.
In the petition, defenders say that Row had difficulties in her family as a child. Her father drank, verbally abused his children and committed many thefts, and Row was sexually abused by her grandfather, it said.
She wet the bed until her early teen years, was picked on at school, witnessed abuse between her family members and was embarrassed of her parents’ unclean and unkempt house, it said.
“Counsel failed to visit — or send anyone to visit — the town where Ms. Row grew up, or to investigate the circumstances of that town,” the petition said.
The petition states that Row has lived with a congenital brain atrophy, which was made worse by her disruptive childhood. A computed tomography scan was conducted in 1993 which the defense said indicated brain damage. They claimed it was confirmed by more imaging in 2001 and 2016.
“Ms. Row’s cerebellum can be clearly seen with large gaps in brain tissue in the parietal region and between the cortex and the perimeter of the skull,” it said, and that the cerebellum looks like a “shrunken broccoli” and that it is “remarkably abnormal.”
The defense said in their petition that a major function of the cerebellum is to modify learning, behavior, judgment, decision making, planning and mood, citing testimony from neurologists from a previous federal evidentiary hearing.
Additionally, the petition said there may have been abuse within her own marriage with Randy Row, and one of the original defense’s strategies was to construct a theory that Robin Row’s husband had a damaged frontal lobe that “increased the chances he committed the crime to punish his wife.” Row’s current counsel says this is ironic, as the defense should have also focused on their own client’s brain damage first.
This mitigating evidence was not brought to the table at Row’s sentencing, it said, which violated her “right to effective assistance of trial counsel.”
The petition stated that her attorneys at the time were made aware of Row’s brain scans and familial history, and if they had presented this information during sentencing, “there would have been a reasonable probability of a life sentence.”
Given the gravity of a death penalty case, there is a “heightened obligation” to pursue mitigation evidence during sentencing, the documents say — and no one investigated further.
Detectives and specialists hardly looked into Row’s past, her attorneys claim, and failed to present it in any meaningful way. They also claim the specialists that were introduced were hardly qualified as experts in relation to Row’s history. Additionally, they said, there is no evidence that further neuropsychiatric evaluations occurred as recommended.
Row’s current defense says certain doctors' analyses of Row’s brain were “exceedingly preliminary” as they conducted personality tests rather than neuropsychological tests, incapable of truly diagnosing brain damage, the petition said.
“Trial counsel had such a line of inquiry dropped in their laps in the form of a report from an independent doctor finding brain damage and suggesting further exploration, thus alerting them that one of the most powerful mitigators in the capital world was present. They failed to conduct that exploration, and they were grossly deficient as a result,” the petition said.
“She did get the death penalty, and it's just being dragged on and on and on at the expense of everybody,” Randy Row's older sister Chris Danielson told KTVB in 2012.
Row currently resides at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pocatello. She is 64 years old. If Row was given an option to be re-sentenced, it would likely be before a jury rather than from a judge like her sentencing in 1993.
A motion hearing in this case is scheduled for Aug. 2 at 1 p.m.
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