Constitutionality of death penalty at issue

The attorneys representing murder defendant Joel Courtney have filed a motion to dismiss the charges that could lead to a death sentence for their client.

Courtney faces 14 counts of aggravated murder in connection with the disappearance of 19-year-old Brooke Wilberger.

The Veneta teen disappeared from a Corvallis apartment complex parking lot on May 24, 2004, and has not been seen since. She is presumed dead.

Attorneys Steven Krasik and Steven Gorham filed the 347-page demurrer motion in Benton County Circuit Court on March 30. Gorham described a demurrer as "a legal attack against the indictment and the death penalty."

The bulk of the motion addresses the constitutionality of capital punishment, specifically lethal injection.

A small portion of the document addresses issues in the Courtney case.

"Because of the type of case … there are specifics that you have to look at and generalities," Gorham said.

According to the document, the district attorney's original indictment "is not sufficient because it does not allege all the necessary elements of aggravated murder."

Krasik declined to expand on what that meant, saying the motion would be argued in hearings.

Some pretrial hearings in the case are set to begin May 4. The demurrer was filed as part of a second round of hearings scheduled for this summer.

Benton County District Attorney John Haroldson said his office would answer the demurrer in court.

"We're working on the motions that we anticipated the defense would file, and we're going to be prepared to respond," he said.

The demurrer has four parts: challenges to the counts in the indictment; the history of the death penalty in Oregon; challenges to capital punishment procedure; and constitutional reasons the death penalty is inappropriate and lethal injection is cruel and unusual.

It is typical for the defense to file a demurrer in a death penalty case, Gorham said, adding that in his experience with capital murder cases, higher courts usually ended up overturning death penalties for the reasons that the defense had set forth in a demurrer.

Harry Charles Moore was the last person executed in the state of Oregon. He died by lethal injection on May 16, 1997, for the 1978 shooting deaths of two of his relatives.