Binion jury foreman agrees with sentences

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000 | 11:08 a.m.

Arthur Spear Jr., the jury foreman in the Ted Binion murder trial, said Monday he wasn't surprised to see District Judge Joseph Bonaventure give more prison time to the wealthy gambling figure's convicted killers.

Bonaventure on Friday handed out sentences that will keep Rick Tabish in prison for at least 25 years and Sandy Murphy behind bars for 22 years for their convictions on all the charges related to Binion's Sept. 17, 1998, slaying.

In May Spear and his fellow jurors recommended life with the possibility of parole after 20 years on the first-degree murder charge.

"I think Judge Bonaventure truly felt that they were guilty," Spear said in an hourlong telephone interview. "But he didn't give out the heaviest sentences he could have on the other counts.

"I accept what the judge did. It's OK."

The retired aerospace engineer said the jury recommended the sentence that called for parole after 20 years for Murphy and Tabish knowing Bonaventure probably would dish out additional prison time on the theft and conspiracy charges.

He said that was one reason why the 12-member panel didn't recommend a harsher life without parole sentence on the murder charge.

"We knew they would have to get more jail time from the judge," said Spear, who guided his colleagues through eight days of deliberations before they convicted both defendants on May 19.

Murphy, a 28-year-old onetime topless dancer who had been living with Binion, and Tabish, her 35-year-old lover, were found guilty of pumping the former Horseshoe executive with drugs and suffocating him.

Spear said most of the jurors felt during the penalty deliberations that the two defendants should get the same sentence.

The jurors, he said, firmly believed that Murphy and Tabish had killed the 55-year-old Binion, but they weren't sure about the degree of culpability of each defendant.

"We didn't know how much one was more involved than the other," he said. "We didn't know whose idea it was."

Spear said he felt vindicated when Bonaventure on Sept. 8 dismissed defense claims of misconduct on the part of the jurors and refused to grant the defendants a new trial.

"I'm glad he saw through the defense smog," he said.

At the same time, Spear said his experience in the Binion case has left him disheartened with the jury process.

He said he probably never would serve on a jury again, primarily because of the way defense attorneys attacked the integrity of the jurors after the trial and forced them to explain their actions on the witness stand.

"I thought that was a dastardly thing to do," he said. "We all thought that we had done our civic duty, and we tried very very hard to make the deliberations fair.

"We weren't going to decide if they were guilty or not guilty until we reviewed all of the evidence. We worked very hard to do the right thing."

At the same time, Spear said he held no animosity toward the defense lawyers.

"You can't blame the defense for grasping at every straw it can to try to overturn the verdict and get a new trial," he said.

Spear said the jurors were emotionally drained after reaching their guilty verdicts in one of the longest deliberating sessions in Southern Nevada history.

"That's why we requested not to speak to the media afterwards," he said.

Dissident juror Joan Sanders, who went to the defense with claims of jury misconduct, did not participate much during the deliberations, Spear said.

"I would try to bring her into the discussions," he said, "but she would say I'm just listening, and all the while she's listening, she's writing feverishly on a note pad."

Sanders was rumored after the verdict to be interested in writing a book. But she has since denied that.

The book effort on the part of the nine jurors aligned with Spear still is alive, the foreman said. But he acknowledged that no deal has been struck.

The jurors, he said, went into the last day of deliberations with all but Sanders convinced that Murphy and Tabish had killed Binion.

But he added: "We never put any pressure on her to make a decision."

After lunch at the Golden Nugget hotel-casino that day, Sanders told her fellow jurors that she was prepared to convict the defendants, Spear said.

"She said words to the effect, 'I don't know how they could have done this awful crime.' "

Sanders filed a sworn affidavit last month saying she now believes Murphy and Tabish did not kill Binion.

She changed her opinion after hearing a discussion of the legal term, "depraved indifference," which was not part of the jury instructions, in the deliberation room, she said.

The phrase, she said, was explained to her as meaning that Murphy and Tabish could be convicted of killing Binion if they merely were in his house and did not try to stop his death.

But Bonaventure, following a lengthy hearing in which all of the jurors were hauled to court, ruled Sept. 8 that the reference to depraved indifference did not affect the deliberations.

Spear said he received a strange call from Sanders several weeks before the hearing in which she said she had received a subpoena to testify in court and wanted to pick his brain.

"I told her tell the truth and review her own notes because they were just as good as mine," he said.

Sanders, he said, later leveled her accusations against her fellow jurors.