A convicted murderer is seeking a new trial two decades after being found guilty of killing a four-year-old girl by cooking her in an oven.<\/p>\n
A federal judge has ruled that 66-year-old John Lane had presented enough evidence to show his mental illness had prevented him from filing an appeal sooner.<\/p>\n
Lane was convicted of the 1984 murder of Angela Palmer, who he put in an oven, turned up the heat and stopped her getting out by putting a chair under the handle of the door.<\/p>\n
Firefighters in Auburn, Maine, responding to reports of smoke inside an apartment building, found the little girl’s remains inside an oven in Lane’s flat.<\/p>\n
In a motion filed in federal court, Lane claims his lawyer had failed to properly defend him during his 1985 murder trial.<\/p>\n
He argued his lawyer should have introduced his mental health records into evidence and failed to challenge statements by a psychiatrist that Lane understood the wrongfulness of his actions.<\/p>\n
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld Lane’s conviction in 1987, according to court documents.<\/p>\n
Lane is currently serving his life sentence at the Maine Correctional Center.<\/p>\n
As well as recommending that Lane be allowed to argue he was too mentally ill to file an appeal before now, the federal judge also rejected the state’s motion to dismiss his appeal.<\/p>\n
The Attorney General’s Office has 14 days to appeal the judge’s decision.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: Sky News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A convicted murderer is seeking a new trial two decades after being found guilty of killing a four-year-old girl by cooking her in an oven. A federal judge has ruled that 66-year-old John Lane had presented enough evidence to show his mental illness had prevented him from filing an appeal sooner. Lane was convicted of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":121167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-121165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-togbe-afede-xiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/121167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}