Opinion ID: 1907203
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 29

Heading: Richard Feaster (2)

Text: On November 1, 1993, the telephone company received a call from a man claiming to have been stabbed. Central dispatch determined the number and location of the caller and notified the police. Police officers arrived at a local gas station to find a male, dead and lying in a pool of blood just outside the station's office door. The victim's front pocket had been turned inside out and blood-stained money was found on the floor. An autopsy later determined that the victim had been stabbed and slashed in excess of forty times about the head, neck and hands. On November 3, 1993, a woman contacted the Prosecutor's office and identified Richard Feaster as the person responsible for two area homicides. She claimed to have heard him confess to the first murder in a bar. A male informant also reported that on October 31, 1993, Feaster had asked the informant to accompany him to pick up his pay-check. While at an intersection, Feaster looked at a gas station and said, Good, there's only one. Feaster then parked the car and told the man to sit in the driver's seat. About twenty minutes later, when Feaster returned, he was covered with blood, his hand was bleeding, and he was holding a bloody knife and some cash. The man drove to his home with Feaster where Feaster put his bloody clothes and boots in a plastic bag and threw the knife behind the house. Based on this information, the police executed a search warrant at the informant's home and recovered the bloody clothes and knife. The police also executed a warrant at Feaster's home, where they recovered a butcher block knife set with one knife missing. Further investigation revealed that an area hospital treated Feaster for lacerations on his hand on November 1, 1993. A jailhouse informant later reported that Feaster told him that he had killed to feel the thrill. At the time of the offense, Feaster was twenty-two years old and lived with his parents and older sister. He had graduated from high school and had previously worked in construction, but was unemployed at the time of the murder. Feaster had no physical, mental or drug dependency problems although he had prior convictions for possession of marijuana and simple assault. Feaster was charged with capital murder, felony murder, robbery and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. On April 1, 1996, he pled guilty to noncapital murder, for which he was later sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years, and robbery, for which he received a consecutive twenty-year sentence with a minimum term of ten years, both terms to run consecutive to his sentence for the other murder. The AOC coded the following aggravating factors: c(4)(a) (prior murder) and c(4)(g) (felony murder); and mitigating factor c(5)(h) (catch-all). Before the disposition in this case, Feaster was convicted of capital murder, felony murder, robbery, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and possession of a sawed-off shotgun. In Feaster (1) he was sentenced to death for the October 6, 1993, murder of a gas station attendant, classified by the AOC as E(5). The following mitigating evidence was presented: both of Feaster's parents were alcoholics; his father was abusive; he had a history of alcohol and cocaine abuse; he was using alcohol before and after the murder; and he suffers from encephalopathy, an injury to the left frontal lobe region, making him more violent than people who do not have this condition.