WOMAN'S SLAYER GETS 20-YEAR TERM

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 28, 1993                   TAG: 9301280127
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
WOMAN'S SLAYER GETS 20-YEAR TERM
A Roanoke man convicted of strangling a woman whose sexually mutilated body was found in an alley was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison.
Circuit Judge Diane Strickland imposed a jury's recommended sentence for Clifford R. Morris.
Morris was convicted in December of the second-degree murder of 41-year-old Marie Howard. On a March morning in 1990, police found Howard's body in an alley near Morris' home.
She had been strangled, and someone had packed gravel into her vagina.
At his trial, Morris said he met Howard at a nightspot and later had consensual sex with her. He denied killing her, saying he last saw her walking away from his home in the rain.
Because it took the jury 11 hours to reach a verdict on largely circumstantial evidence, Assistant Public Defender Gerald Teaster asked Strickland to reduce the sentence.
"This may very well be a compromise verdict with the wrong compromise," Teaster said.
But Strickland upheld the jury's maximum sentence for second-degree murder, noting the brutal nature of the crime.
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by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB