Death penalties stand for Duncan

COEUR d’ALENE —A federal judge has denied 11 of 12 post conviction claims filed by Joseph Edward Duncan III, who was sentenced to three death penalties for terrorizing a Coeur d’Alene family and killing four of them more than a decade ago.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward J. Lodge upheld all but one claim in which Duncan, 56. challenged a death penalty for using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.

A jury in 2008 found that three of Duncan’s crimes including kidnapping, sexual exploitation and the firearms conviction were worthy of the death penalty, adding them to three consecutive life sentences and four 10-year sentences.

The sentences came after Duncan pleaded guilty to killing Brenda Groene, 40, her 37-year-old boyfriend, Mark McKenzie and 13-year-old son, Slade at a home along Interstate 90 near Wolf Lodge Bay. He kidnapped 8-year-old Shasta Groene and her 9-year-old brother Dylan and after weeks of torturing and raping the children, Duncan killed Dylan at a Montana campsite. He was captured weeks later at Denny’s restaurant after returning with Shasta to Coeur d’Alene.

Lodge, in a 64-page ruling issued March 22, upheld all the sentences with the exception of the one death penalty. Lodge took that sentence under advisement as he awaits a decision on similar constitutional matters being heard by two federal appellate courts.

“Claim nine is under advisement pending resolution of the cases under consideration by the Ninth Circuit and the US Supreme Court,” Lodge wrote in his order.

In the ninth claim, Duncan’s attorneys argue that the law against using a firearm in a crime in which people are killed is vague and the death penalty that a jury brought back on that charge should be overturned.

Regardless of how the appellate courts rule, the death sentences for kidnapping and sexual exploitation will remain in affect, Lodge wrote.

Duncan has also been convicted for a 1997 murder of a boy in California and he confessed to killing two girls in Seattle in the 1990s.

He is being held in federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.