U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear Calambro appeal

Sandra Chereb

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 1999 | 8:21 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to consider the appeal of a mother who claims her son on Nevada's death row is mentally incompetent to decide he wants to die.

The action by the nation's high court, made without comment Monday, sends the case of Alvaro Calambro back to U.S. District Court in Reno, where Judge Howard McKibben will decide if Calambro's mother can intervene on his behalf.

Calambro, 25, was sentenced to die for the January 1994 murders of Peggy Crawford and Keith Christopher at a Reno U-Haul business.

Ms. Crawford's head was split open with a tire iron and Christopher's was crushed by a hammer.

The killings occurred during a $2,400 robbery at the U-Haul business where Calambro's crime partner, Duc Huynh, had just been fired.

After the killings, Huynh and Calambro fled and were arrested following a crime spree that began in Sacramento and ended with a high-speed highway chase, the kidnapping of a woman security guard in Los Angeles, and a 9 1/2-hour standoff.

Huynh also got the death sentence but hanged himself at Ely State Prison.

Calambro has said he wants to die for the murders. His defense lawyers have argued he is mentally incompetent to make that decision, but a majority of Nevada's Supreme Court determined otherwise when it upheld his conviction and sentence last year.

Calambro's mother, Lydia Calambro, had sought what's known as "next friend" legal status to try to block her son's execution by lethal injection.

But in its ruling, the state Supreme Court said Calambro's mental illness "has not rendered him incompetent" and denied intervention by his mother.

McKibben held a federal court hearing on Lydia Calambro's petition last year, but delayed ruling in the case until the appeal of the state Supreme Court action was finalized.

"The issue hasn't changed," Calambro's attorney, Federal Public Defender Michael Pescetta, said Monday. "It's still is he rational enough to ... say I don't want any more review of this conviction and sentence."

Pescetta said it will now be up to McKibben to decide "whether we presented enough evidence ... of this fellow's irrationality that he should allow his mother to proceed on his behalf."

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday also rejected without comment an appeal by William B. Leonard, who argued he had ineffective legal counsel when he was sentenced to die for stabbing another convict 21 times with a prison-made knife in 1987.

It was Leonard's third murder conviction and his second for a stabbing death of another prisoner.