Sammantha Allen sentenced to death for locking cousin in 100F storage box: An Arizona woman is to be executed after a jury said the horror of the crime was too great.
Sammantha Lucille Rebecca Allen a 29 year old Arizona woman has been sentenced to death after locking her 10 year old cousin overnight as punishment for stealing an iced treat in 2011.
The death sentence comes after jurors in Sammantha Allen’s murder trial on Monday decided on whether the woman who’d been found guilty in June of the child’s murder should receive a death or life sentence in the killing of her cousin, Ame Deal reported azcentral.
At the time of the ten year old girl’s death, investigators told of the 31-inch-long footlocker the girl had been shut in overnight reaching temperatures of 100 fahrenheit (38 celsius).
Monday’s decision at Maricopa County Superior Court led to Allen becoming the third woman to be sentenced to death in Arizona. The woman had been previously found guilty of first-degree murder and four counts of child abuse in June.
Monday’s death sentencing makes Allen the 55th woman on death row in the U.S.
At the time of Deal’s death, prosecutors told how Allen and her husband, John Michael Allen, stuffed Ame into the small storage box – leaving her overnight outside their home in triple-digital temperatures – as punishment for stealing an ice pop on July 11, 2011.
The girl’s body was found the next day. Authorities said she died of suffocation.
At the time, the couple claimed Ame ‘hiding’ in the box during a game of ‘hide-and-seek’.
The husband who pleaded not guilty to first-degree and child abuse is scheduled to appear for his upcoming trial, starting October 9.
During trial proceedings it was revealed it hadn’t been the first time the young cousin had been gratuitously punished by the family she’d been living with.
In the past the ten year old girl had been forced to eat dog feces, run around in the yard during hot weather along with having been previously been put in the box for wetting her bed in the past.
Allen’s sentencing comes despite Superior Court Judge Teresa Sanders asking the jury consider the defendant’s age, her dysfunctional upbringing and the fact that she had no prior criminal record. Nevertheless after a week of deliberating, the jury determined the ‘horror of the crime’ outweighed all possible exceptions to a life sentence instead.
Three other family members are serving prison time for their roles in Ame’s abuse.
Cynthia Stoltzmann, Sammantha Allen’s mother, was the child’s legal guardian and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Ame was listed as an abused child in Utah, where the family lived from 2006 to 2010, according to AZcentral.
They had moved to Phoenix, but child welfare officials weren’t notified of her abuse before the child’s death.
Along with Sammantha Allen, there are only two other women on death row in Arizona, which is among the states struggling to buy execution drugs after pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.
Arizona is now able to resume executions after a lawsuit that challenged the way Arizona carries out the death penalty was settled earlier this summer. No executions are scheduled. Yet.
I have no sympathy for child abusers and murderers. Is this the right sentence? 12 News #12news https://t.co/nrPO8Ng8pb
— MARK CURTIS (@mcurtis12news) August 7, 2017
