BAY CITY, Texas – Jurors are deliberating in the capital murder retrial of a Texas man who has been waiting in prison for 35 years to be tried again for a 1976 slaying.
Jerry Hartfield faces life in prison if he's convicted again in the slaying of 55-year-old Eunice Lowe in Bay City, about 70 miles southwest of Houston. Jurors there began deliberating Wednesday.
Hartfield was initially sentenced to death. In 1980, an appeals court threw out his conviction, but he was never retried. In 1983, Gov. Mark White commuted Hartfield's sentence to life, but courts determined he didn't have a sentence to commute.
Prosecutors say the death penalty is no longer applicable because the 59-year-old Hartfield is mentally impaired.
Lowe was beaten with a pickaxe, stabbed with a glass bottle, robbed and raped.
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