Supreme Court denies killer’s appeal in jailhouse slaying

By Cy Ryan

Wednesday, April 21, 2010 | 3:46 p.m.

A convicted killer once considered Nevada's most dangerous inmate lost his most recent appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Patrick C. McKenna, 63, has been on death row since 1979 and is among the oldest Nevada prisoners awaiting death by lethal injection.

The Supreme Court today rejected his claims that his lawyer was ineffective during his trial for the 1979 murder of his cell mate, Jack Nobles. McKenna claimed his attorney failed to push for a jury clemency instruction and investigation of a potential defense witness.

McKenna has had three penalty hearings and each time the panel returned the death penalty.

According to prosecutors' version of the events, McKenna returned to the Clark County Jail on Jan. 6, 1979 angry about his conviction that day for raping two women in a downtown motel room.

McKenna played chess with Nobles and drank "pruno" -- an illicit jailhouse brew -- which made him angrier, according to a prosecutor. After Nobles lost the game, the prosecutor said, he took a swing at McKenna, who "exploded and attacked him."

Nobles eventually was choked to death.

As the Sun reported at the time of his third penalty hearing related to the murder in 1996, Nevada officials said that McKenna was at the time the most dangerous man in the state's prison system and the third most dangerous in the country. McKenna had six recorded escape attempts -- two involving guns he obtained while behind bars -- andlaw enforcement officials said at the time there were persistent rumors that members of a prison-based gang would try to break him out.

During those proceedings, 11 uniformed SWAT officers, Metro corrections officers and bailiffs were on duty in the courtroom. McKenna also wore a remote-controlled stun belt with a 50,000-volt shock capability to incapacitate him.

Separately today, the court upheld the first-degree murder conviction and the sentence of death to Siaosi Vanisi in the murder of University Of Nevada, Reno Police Sergeant George Sullivan in 1998.

The court denied the more than 22 claims brought by Vanisi to overturn his death penalty conviction.

There are 80 persons on death row and the last execution was in April 2006 of prisoner Daryl Macy.