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Donnie Delahanty, a dumb-ass kid from a dysfunctional family who killed a cop in 2005 for the hell of it, was ordered to death row earlier today.
Delahanty (shown here in a 2005 photo) stared straight ahead as a court clerk for Superior Court Judge Warren Granville read the jury’s verdict.
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Earlier this month, the same panel convicted the 22-year-old of first-degree murder and other charges in the May 2005 death of veteran Phoenix police officer David Uribe. Delahanty shot the 48-year-old cop three times in the face and neck during a routine traffic stop in west Phoenix.
In his closing argument during the penalty phase, deputy county attorney Michael Gingold aptly described the officer’s murder as “shocking and brutal. [Delahanty] murdered someone simply trying to do his job.”
Gingold suggested to the jury that “the defendant will kill anyone. He is dangerous, it’s that simple, and he must be stopped.”
Stephen Duncan, who was one of Delahanty’s attorneys, pointed out that “this isn’t an eye for an eye society that we live in [and] a life sentence is not a lenient sentence…The tragedy of what happened can’t be undone.”
But the jury didn’t buy that argument, and decided after only a few hours of deliberating whether to impose the ultimate legal sanction–death by lethal injection.
Delahanty soon will be transported to death row at the Arizona State Prison in Florence, to await the outcomes of his automatic appeals in a small cell by himself in the super-max environment of Special Management Unit II.
