Guilty plea in death challenged

Faced with a "potent threat" against his life, Calvin Shane Myers waived his due-process rights and pleaded guilty seven years ago to a crime he couldn't legally have committed, his attorney said Wednesday.

Attorney Scott York argued before the Utah Supreme Court that the case against Myers was improperly elevated to a death-penalty case based on an ambiguous law that criminalizes the killing of unborn children.

Myers is the first person ever charged under the law, for the December 1994 murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, Irene Christensen.

In a plea bargain York maintains Myers accepted to save his life, Myers pleaded guilty in February 1996 to one count of capital murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Prosecutors dismissed a second charge of capital murder.

The charges were based on a legal provision that allows capital murder charges if two or more people were killed as part of acriminal episode.

York argued Wednesday that the term "unborn child" in Utah's homicide statute is vague and provides no guidance to prosecutors and trial court judges.

Vague laws present the opportunity to "manifest a great injustice in that the prosecutor is empowered to apply that law where he sees fit and how he sees fit," he said.

The case is not about fetal rights, York said.

"We're certainly not asking this court to decide when life begins," he said. "That's the Legislature's job."

Because the challenge is not to the statute itself, the Supreme Court will not need to wade into the murky issue of when a fetus becomes a "person" for the purposes of the law. That issue is currently pending before the court in the case of Roger Martin MacGuire, who is charged with two counts of murder for allegedly killing his pregnant ex-wife in January 2001.

The state argued Wednesday that because the vagueness argument was not first raised in a lower court, it is barred from being argued in the current petition for post-conviction relief.

Assistant Attorney General Christopher Ballard said the central issue for the court to decide is whether Myers' original defense attorney provided ineffective counsel in advising Myers to accept prosecutors' plea offer.

With eyewitness testimony and Myers' own confession, Ballard said, Myers faced the very real possibility of being convicted on the two capital murder charges.