CO Appeals Court overturns 3-year sentence for former nurse who helped Patrick Frazee after Kelsey Berreth murder
Feb 18, 2021
Krystal Jean Kenney, the former nurse who helped Teller County rancher Patrick Frazee clean up blood after the murder of his fiance Kelsey Berreth, appears on course for an early prison release after the Colorado Court of Appeals on Wednesday overturned her three-year sentence.
Ruling that Teller County District Judge Scott Sells erred in sentencing Kenney, 34, in the aggravated range for evidence tampering, a three-judge panel vacated the sentence and ordered Sells to resentence her in the normal range of 1 to 1½ years in prison.
The ruling is likely to set her up for release on parole, said her attorney Dru Nielsen of Denver, who cheered the court’s finding and praised Kenney as an “exemplary inmate.”
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“She’s been in for 13 months. So, yes, with her good and earned time … she should be eligible for release immediately.”
A resentencing hearing has yet to be scheduled, court records show, and Kenney remains incarcerated at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.
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She faces a mandatory one-year parole under terms of her plea bargain.
The 12-page ruling was written by Judge Neeti V. Pawar with Judges David J. Richman and Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov concurring, according to a copy of the order.
The panel found that Kenney, a former Idaho nurse also known as Krystal Lee, did not admit aggravating factors meriting an aggravated sentence as part of her February 2019 plea deal, according to the ruling. Nor did she formally consent to “judicial factfinding” necessary for the judge to impose an aggravated sentence of his own accord.
For those reasons, Sells’ penalty violated Kenney’s constitutional rights under Blakely v. Washington, a 2004 Supreme Court decision, the panel found.
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Sells seized on Kenney’s admission that she “knew Frazee had committed a homicide” in imposing the aggravated sentence. However, the appeals court found that part of her statement wasn’t “essential” to her guilty plea to evidence tampering and couldn’t be lawfully used as grounds for aggravation.