An Ely State Prison inmate who once gain notoriety for being the youngest man on death row died in his cell Monday at the age of 48.
Nevada Department of Corrections officials said Monday that Edward Bennett was found unresponsive in his cell on March 7. A press release from the agency indicates Bennett lived alone in the cell.
In addition to a sentence of life without parole for murder, the agency says Bennett was also serving sentences for attempted murder, attempted robbery and weapons charges.
The White Pine Sheriff’s Office Coroner is expected to conduct an autopsy.
Benett was originally sentenced to death for the 1988 murder of 21-year-old Michelle Moore, who was a casher of a Las Vegas Stop N’Go. Bennett and his co-defendant, Joe Beeson, tried unsuccessfully to rob the store.
Just 17 at the time of the murder and 18 when he was convicted Bennett became a minor cause celbre as the only teenage on Nevada’s Death Row. Eventually his supporters won him an appeal in 2003.
After a 2003 Supreme Court decision granting Edward Bennett a new penalty hearing, the jury sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On Feb. 9, 1988 as Moore went to ring up a piece of candy Beeson brought to the counter, Bennett, then fired a .45-caliber handgun at point-blank range, killing her instantly.
Moore’s family, who attended the six-day penalty hearing in District Judge Valerie Adair’s courtroom, was distraught over the verdict.
“We thought we were done,” said Moore’s husband, Frank to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “We healed the best we could and moved on, and this has just opened up old wounds and made new ones.”
Her mother, Colleen Bard, said she was surprised to open a newspaper about five years ago and learn that Bennett would receive a new trial.
“Because he’s older now, they (the jury) took pity on him. But my daughter didn’t get a chance to grow older.”
Bennett was 35 at the time of his second trail and had spent abut half his life behind bars.
“They had to go through this again after all this time, and now his appellate process starts all over again,” prosecutor Chris Owens said.
The jury cited Bennett’s genuine remorse over the crime as a mitigating factor in its decision.
The high court twice had upheld Bennett’s conviction and death sentence. But in 1998, he filed a new petition to appeal.
A lower court found that Bennett was entitled to file another petition because of a decision denying him an investigator to help in a previous appellate proceeding. The lower court found that the prosecution withheld evidence that might have helped Bennett’s case and found that a new penalty hearing was warranted.
The Supreme Court agreed and found that one piece of information that was withheld improperly was a statement from a jail house informant suggesting Beeson was the leader and instigator of the robbery, not Bennett.
Also undisclosed to the defense was Beeson’s earlier criminal history. Finally, the prosecution failed to disclose that one of its witnesses was a paid police informant.
Given those factors, the court majority agreed Bennett should get a new penalty hearing.
The victory for Bennett proved somewhat Pyrrhic. After avoiding the executioner Bennett was moved off of death row into the general population.
His small butt very vocal group of supporters quickly fell away and stopped visiting.Life in ESP gen/pop is by no means considered easy.
All prisons have nicknames Alcatraz was known as the “Rock”, Pelican Bay – “Skeleton Bay”, San Quentin is known as the “Arena”. Nevada’s Maximum Security Prison in Ely, Patten’s probable future home is called the “Graveyard”.
According to former and present inmates Ely Max earned its name due to what they call the larger than normal number of deaths at the facility than other prisons.
“Ely State Prison is a place of death, stagnation, misery, pain, loneliness and indeterminate lock down. If you were to take a walk on one of these depressing tiers back here in “the hole,” you would hear many disembodied voices ring out, yelling in anger and frustration, trying to tell you how bad it is for us in here, in between the isolated confines of steel and stone.” Wrote an inmate under the pseudonym of ‘Coyote’ “…I can see why Ely State Prison is labeled “The Graveyard,” there are so many deaths there. It is a locked down, maximum security prison, all but half of one unit – the workers unit – which is on one side of Unit 8…”
Ironically Benett’s partner in the killing, Beeson, who received a life sentence, was himself murdered at ESP in 1991 two years after he began serving his sentence.