Death penalty for accomplice in killing possible

There has never been a man sent to Nevada's death row who wasn't the trigger man or otherwise directly responsible for a murder, according to defense attorney Peter S. Christiansen.

He doesn't want his client, 21-year-old Bryan Keith Robinson, to be the first.

Deputy District Attorney Dan Seaton does, telling a jury that the convicted killer also was responsible for three other murders where he was the gunman and involved in several other shootings and robberies.

For a few days Christiansen believed Robinson would escape the death penalty because of a ruling by District Judge Lee Gates that it was legally improper, but the Nevada Supreme Court stepped in Friday and it again became a possibility.

Robinson, who came to Las Vegas from the gang-infested streets of Compton, Calif., was convicted last week of first-degree murder for his role in the murder of Tracey Kennedy at a North Las Vegas condominium complex.

It was Robinson's first trial and his involvement was limited to disabling the victim with a punch before the gunman, alleged to be Derrick Hilliard, fired bullet after bullet into the stunned man.

Although he was not the shooter, Nevada law says any participant in a slaying is equally guilty of first-degree murder.

Robinson's penalty hearing began Monday and the same jury that convicted him will have to decide if he should be given the death penalty or be sentenced to prison for life with or without the possibility of parole.

While the jury had not been allowed to hear the other charges pending against Robinson before deciding his guilt, evidence from all those cases is being given to the jury this week.

On the day Robinson was convicted of murder, it appeared the jury would not be allowed to consider the death sentence because Gates ruled that the lone "aggravating circumstance" alleged by prosecutors to justify the death penalty was improper.

The special circumstance contends that during the murder there was the risk of harm to more than one person. Two other people, in fact, were shot during the Sept. 21, 1996, incident, but the evidence was that those were intentional shootings and Robinson was convicted of attempted murder for both instances.

Gates decided the aggravating circumstance actually was designed for situations where someone shoots into a crowd or sets off a bomb, although the Nevada Supreme Court has given it a much broader interpretation.

The district attorney's office appealed and on Friday the high court ordered Gates to again make the death penalty a possibility.

As the penalty hearing began, it appeared it would last several days because a key witness for the defense -- the sister who raised Robinson -- was in jail in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., for traffic violations.

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