TOPEKA, Kan. — The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday upheld the conviction and life-without-parole sentence of a Mexican national judged guilty of capital murder in the November 2007 death of adult performer Zoey Zane.
Israel Mireles, 29, had sought a new trial on grounds the presiding judge erred during jury instruction. According to Mireles’ attorney, Butler County District Judge David Ricke deprived Mireles of the opportunity to receive a lighter sentence when Ricke neglected to inform jury members they could determine the murder was not premeditated.
After a four-day trial in February 2010, a jury took little more than an hour to convict Mireles of raping and stabbing to death 18-year-old college student Emily Sander, who performed on the internet under the pseudonym Zoey Zane. Mireles reportedly met Sander at a bar hours before she died, and the two adjourned to his nearby motel room. During trial, Mireles maintained Sander was killed by an unnamed man after Mireles walked out on a drug deal gone bad. When Mireles returned after allegedly taking a drive “to cool down,” Sander’s mutilated body was alone in the blood-spattered room.
Mireles said he panicked and threw Sander’s body and the murder weapon into the trunk of his car, then dumped the body along a highway about 50 miles from the murder scene before throwing the knife in the trash at an acquaintance’s home. Mireles then fled to his native Mexico. Sander’s nude, stabbed, strangled and beaten body was found six days later; Mireles was arrested the following month. Mexican authorities agreed to extradition only after U.S. authorities promised not to seek the death penalty.
In its unanimous May 10 decision, the Kansas Supreme Court agreed that although Judge Ricke might have instructed the jury to consider the possibility Mireles was too intoxicated at the time to plan a murder, the legal standard for judicial error is whether the jury would have reached the same conclusion had the neglected instruction been given. The justices determined the jury, which had viewed copious photographic and other evidence that Sander was sodomized, stabbed repeatedly and strangled with a phone cord, likely would have convicted Mireles of premeditation even with the additional instruction.
“Accordingly, we conclude that even if the jury would have received an instruction on [the lesser charge of] felony murder, the jury would have still convicted Mireles of capital murder,” Justice Eric Rosen wrote for the court.
