High court rejects death penalty notice

Friday, April 22, 2005 | 9 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The Nevada Supreme Court Thursday ruled that a notice to seek the death penalty against Cornelius E. Rogers for a Henderson murder was flawed.

The court said District Judge Jennifer Togliatti "manifestly abused" her discretion in not granting a motion by Rogers to strike four of the five aggravating cirumstances in the notice to seek the death penalty.

The court said Togliatti should rule that the four circumstances were defective and should be eliminated from the notice. It also lifted the stay it had imposed on the case in November 2004.

The court said, "It is more economical and just to remedy the violation now than to try to do so after a conviction, whether or not Rogers receives a death penalty."

Rogers, an ex-convict, was charged with the March 2001 suffocation of Julie Holt, 33, a mentally handicapped woman.

The court said the death penalty notice listed the aggravating circumstances committed during the murder as: robbery, burglary, kidnapping and the commission of a crime to avoid arrest. The court said the four aggravating circumstances did not provide any supporting fact and only repeated the law.

The law, the court said, requires the district attorney's office to provide "with specificity the facts" surrounding the allegations.

The court said one of the five aggravating circumstances was proper. In this one, it noted that Rogers was an ex-convict and this would be his third offense. He was convicted in California in 1986 of robbery, forcible rape and oral copulation with a person under 14-years-old. He was also convicted in Nevada in 1993 of attempted robbery with use of a deadly weapon.

Holt was found dead on the floor of a bathroom by her father when he returned home. Police later arrested Rogers on possession of stolen property charges after police found items stolen from the Holt home inside Rogers' apartment.

Rogers had been released from the Southern Desert Correctional Center near Indian Springs four months before the murder.