The court of appeals affirmed a district court judgment denying a petition for writ of habeas corpus. The court held that the overwhelming evidence of a murder victim’s mutilation, along with proper instruction regarding that death penalty aggravating circumstance, rendered harmless the state trial court’s instructional error on a second aggravating circumstance of “depravity of mind.”
In 1979, sixteen-year old Nancy Griffith accepted a ride from Robert Ybarra. He kidnapped her, raped her, then doused her with gasoline and set her afire. Griffith, despite being horrifically burned, crawled a quarter mile to a road to summon help. Upon being discovered, she described her ordeal and provided a description of the man who had attacked her. She died from her injuries later that day.
