Today, the court overturned Nowell's 2005 conviction, vacated his death sentence and ordered a new trial for two reasons.
* Keeping Nelson Ortega off the jury violated the state's inability to strike prospective jurors on the basis of race alone.
* The trial court should have backed up a defense objection to the prosecutor's closing arguments.
"We conclude that the State's race-neutral reasons were clearly pretextual and not genuine and the trial court therefore committed reversible error in allowing the State to exercise a peremptory challenge against Mr. Ortega," the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
In closing arguments at the sentencing phase of Nowell's trial, the prosecutor told jurors they should show the defendant the same mercy he'd shown his victims. The court said that isn't allowed.
"We held that this line of argument is blatantly impermissible (in previous court rulings) which condemned these type of arguments because they are an unnecessary appeal to the sympathies of the jurors," the court wrote.
