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Mitigating Factor

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1. Aggravating and mitigating factors weigh on what a person’s sentence will be. Aggravators and mitigators are only factored in after the person has been found guilty. For a prosecutor to be able to try and get the death penalty for a person, the criminal must have committed a crime that involved at least one aggravating factor. Aggravating factors include: rape, arson, child molesting, criminal gang activity, and many more. In Indiana there are only 18 aggravators. Aggravators can make a sentence longer or more intense if the person has committed a crime involving several aggravators. The opposite of an aggravating factor is a mitigating factor. Mitigations are used to lessen a sentence. Anything and everything can be used as a …show more content…

The person I picked who received the death penalty is Roy Lee Ward. This man killed only one person, but did so in a violent and heinous murder. Ward was pretending to look for his dog that he claimed was lost, when his victim, Stacy Payne, let him enter her home. Shortly after entering he attacked Stacy. Her screams woke her sister, Melissa, who was sleeping upstairs. Melissa dialed 911 while hearing her sister’s desperate cry for him to stop. Ward was still present, holding a knife and bloodied when police personnel showed up. He was arrested at the scene of the crime. Stacy’s body was mutilated. Her throat was slashed to the windpipe, wrist slit to the bone, body nearly cut in two, and vaginal bruising.
3. With any murder case wanting to be tried for the death penalty, there must be at least one aggravator. In this particular case involving Roy Lee Ward, there were three aggravating factors: rape, on probation/parole, and torture/mutilation. There were also mitigations. Some of the mitigations in this case were: mental retardation, low intelligence, parents were divorced, and exhibitionism disorder. These mitigations did not work on lessening his sentence or taking him off of death row, but in many cases, if people are intellectually disabled or have an IQ under 70, they cannot receive the death

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