A New Castle man who has spent more than two decades battling a death sentence for robbing and killing a man on the South Side will now spend the rest of his life in prison after a judge resentenced him yesterday.
Salvador Carlos Santiago, 46, was initially sentenced to death for the January 1985 slaying of Patrick Huber, a 23-year-old printer at Minuteman Press on East Carson Street. In the brutal killing, police said Mr. Santiago stole $16 from the store's cash register then forced Mr. Huber to kneel in the store's back room before shooting him once in the back of the head.
Just two days before Mr. Huber's slaying, Mr. Santiago shot and killed 20-year-old Dean K. O'Hara, who had stopped to help Mr. Santiago when the car Mr. Santiago was driving broke down on a highway outside of New Castle. Mr. Santiago was sentenced to life in prison for the killing and did not appeal that case.
The Huber case has spent the last 23 years winding its way through state and federal courts as Mr. Santiago exhausted every avenue of appeal, including unsuccessfully petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court in October 1995. At one point, in 1991, he was successful in getting the state to grant him a new trial. He was again convicted and sentenced to death in 1993.
On Sept. 22, 2004, Gov. Ed Rendell signed a death warrant for Mr. Santiago and his execution by lethal injection was scheduled for that November. But before he could be executed, Mr. Santiago filed a petition in federal court challenging both his conviction and sentencing on numerous grounds, including that his appointed attorneys were ineffective.
After spending the last five years of wrangling in federal court, Allegheny County Assistant District Attorney Ronald Wabby and Mr. Santiago's public defender, Billy Nolas of the Federal Community Defender Office, signed an order that allowed for the death sentence to be vacated in exchange for Mr. Santiago agreeing not to pursue any more appeals.
The order, signed by both attorneys and issued by U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti in June, conceded Mr. Santiago's claim that he received ineffective counsel during the death penalty phase of his second trial and ordered that he be resentenced to life imprisonment. Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning's resentencing yesterday came as a result of the order.
Mr. Wabby said he was not conceding that Mr. Santiago received ineffective counsel and called signing the agreement a means to an end.
"Looking at the background of the case, the interest of the victim, the interest of the commonwealth ... the resolution of these issues was the best for all the parties involved in this way," he said. "In order to get [Mr. Santiago] that type of relief, that's what we had to agree to."
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