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Oklahoma teen who fatally shot Australian student gets life sentence Oklahoma teen who fatally shot Australian student gets life sentence
(about 2 hours later)
An Oklahoma teenager charged with killing an Australian college baseball player has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.An Oklahoma teenager charged with killing an Australian college baseball player has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.
District court judge Ken Graham on Tuesday handed down the punishment to 18-year-old Chancey Allen Luna. A Stephens County jury convicted Luna of first-degree murder in the August 2013 shooting death of 22-year-old Christopher Lane.District court judge Ken Graham on Tuesday handed down the punishment to 18-year-old Chancey Allen Luna. A Stephens County jury convicted Luna of first-degree murder in the August 2013 shooting death of 22-year-old Christopher Lane.
Authorities say Lane was shot in the back while he was jogging in Duncan. Defense attorneys say Luna fired the shot, but only meant to scare Lane. As Luna, shackles on his wrists and ankles, stood in court waiting to learn his sentence, a prosecutor noticed something.
Graham delivered the sentence recommended by the jury in April after Luna was found guilty. Written in black pen on the back pocket of Luna’s orange jumpsuit were three words: “Crip for Life”.
Lane, from Melbourne, Australia, was in Oklahoma on a baseball scholarship. Theories of why Luna at the age of just 16 in August, 2013, pointed a .22 calibre revolver out the window of a friend’s Ford Focus and shot Australian baseball player Chris Lane in the back as he jogged along a street had swirled around the small rural city of Duncan, Oklahoma.
There had been no mention of a motive at Luna’s three-and-a-half-day first-degree murder trial in April when a jury found him guilty and recommended he never be released from jail.
The local police chief, in the days after Lane’s murder, said Luna and two mates, James Edwards, 15, and Michael Jones, 17, had confessed to being bored and decided to kill someone.
The “bored” evidence was never mentioned at the trial.
But there, just as Luna was about to be sentenced on Tuesday, the answer appeared to be etched into his prison jumpsuit.
“I have no doubt he is part of that gang,” Stephens County district attorney Jason Hicks later told reporters.
Hicks added that Luna, in a pre-sentence report, admitted to being part of the Rollin 90s Crips, a notorious gang founded in Los Angeles’ southern suburbs that had spread across the US.
Hicks said Luna had also been selling drugs before gunning down Lane.
Videos of Luna and Edwards on social media had shown them holding bundles of cash, flashing gang signs and Edwards fooling around with a shot gun.
The murder of Melbourne-raised Lane, who had a baseball sports scholarship with Oklahoma’s East Central University and was visiting his girlfriend Sarah Harper at her family’s home in Duncan, rocked the city.
It caused so much media coverage that the US president, Barack Obama, offered his condolences to Lane’s parents.
At the trial the jury heard how Lane decided to go out for a jog and the three boys happened to come across him while in the Ford Focus.
Luna shot him and they sped off in the car, leaving Lane to die.
A 911 call played at the trial gave an horrific window into how the gasping Lane, with a bullet hole in his back, both lungs punctured, two ribs broken and his aorta and pulmonary artery torn, died in agony in a ditch on the side of the road about 10 minutes later.
Graham fought back tears as he spoke of the pain he felt for Lane’s family in Australia and at having to sentence a teenager to life behind bars with no chance of parole.
“It’s tough,” the judge said. “It’s tough on me to sentence a man like that. His life is wasted.
“Obviously Christopher Lane’s life is over at no fault of his own.”
Lane’s parents, Peter and Donna, remained in Australia for the sentencing and Harper wasn’t in court, but her parents and family members attended.
Luna’s mother, Jennifer, said her son was part of a “wannabe gang”, not an actual gang.
She said bonafide gangs were in the neighbouring city of Lawton, but didn’t exist in Duncan.
“That’s all it is – wannabe gangs,” Jennifer Luna said. “These little kids running the streets, that’s all it is.”
Luna’s lawyers Jim and Howard Berry filed an appeal minutes after the sentence, arguing the trial should never have been held in close-knit Duncan and that the then 16-year-old should have been prosecuted as a juvenile, not as an adult.
It will take two years for the appeal to be heard.
“We just don’t think we got a fair trial,” Jim Berry said.
Luna has requested he be moved to one of America’s most notorious prisons – Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, nicknamed “Big Mac”.
The 107-year-old maximum security prison houses more than 1,100 inmates, is home to the state’s death row and is where executions are undertaken.
Luna couldn’t face a death sentence because he was a juvenile.
Jim Berry said Luna was looking forward to the prison because it has outdoor yards, not like the enclosed Stephens County jail.
Luna’s mother said she had been harassed by locals in Duncan and wuld move close to McAlester.
When Luna was asked by Graham if he had anything to say before the sentence was announced the teenager shook his head.
Asked later if he thought Luna had shown any remorse the judge had a quick reply. “Never,” he said. “Never.”
Associated Press and Australian Associated Press contributed to this report