AnnieTV: Opposition Statement on Death Penalty Repeal

Mr. Speaker, Order of Business 15.

On September 2, 2011 Alyssa Otremba, just 15 years old, was walking home from borrowing a textbook from a friend.  Javier Righetti kidnapped and dragged Alyssa into a desert lot where he sexually assaulted and raped her.

Righetti then stabbed Alyssa more than 80 times in her head, neck and body, then carved an “LV,” for Las Vegas, into her thigh because it made him feel “gangster”. During the autopsy it was discovered that the tip of the knife had broken off in her skull.

He returned hours later and poured gasoline on Alyssa’s body and lit it on fire. The coroner had to use dental records to identify her.  Alyssa’s remains were in such bad condition that her family was advised not to see her because they shouldn’t remember her like that.

Javier Righetti’s guilt is not in question.  He gave Alyssa Otremba a death sentence.  He should get the same.

*  *  *

On January 20th, 2008, a college student named Brianna Denison was kidnapped, raped and brutally murdered by James Biela, who is currently on Nevada’s death row.  Her murder was committed just two months after Biela brutally raped at gunpoint another college student in a UNR parking garage.

Miss Denison’s body, clothed only in socks, was found weeks after the murder in a snow-covered field near a Reno business park under a discarded Christmas tree.  She had been smothered with a pillow, raped, and ultimately strangled to death.

DNA evidence conclusively proved Biela was Miss Denison’s killer.  He was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death by a jury.  Bri was only 19 years old with her entire life ahead of her.  But James Biela gave her the death penalty.

He should get the same.  And the sooner the better.

*   *   *

In the early morning hours of June 3, 1999, Zane Floyd walked into a neighborhood grocery store in Las Vegas and brutally executed four innocent Nevadans with a shotgun, including a mentally disabled young man and a 60-year-old grandmother who begged for her life.

After his arrest, Mr. Floyd told a detective that he “looked right at her and I just blew her head apart.”  One of the police officers who captured Floyd at the scene of the bloody rampage recently wrote me recently about the incident.  Floyd said to him, “I probably shouldn’t have done that.  She reminded me of my mom.”

There is no doubt about Mr. Floyd’s guilt.  He was given a fair trial and sentenced to death by a jury.  Considering the circumstances, it was the right and proper sentence.

According to the Nevada Department of Corrections, as of March 29, 2021 there were 1,126 convictions for 1st degree murder currently in our prisons.  Just 6.5% of those prisoners are on death row.  Only the worst of the worst are sentenced to death.  That is as it should be.  We shouldn’t abolish the death penalty.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.