Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 22, 1993 TAG: 9306220280
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: HILLSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
The sentences imposed Monday on Thomas Jefferson Midkiff reflected those set by a jury at a six-day trial last month. Midkiff also was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $15,000 for arson in the fire that destroyed the home of the victims.
Circuit Judge Duane Mink said the sentences would be consecutive. Midkiff could get still more prison time. Mink set a hearing for July 1 for Midkiff to show cause why he should not now be required to serve sentences from previous charges for which he was on parole or which had been suspended.
Midkiff served notice that he intended to appeal the jury verdict.
He originally had been charged with capital murder, which could have meant the death penalty, on the basis of having killed 30-year-old Sheila Marie Ring and her daughter, Jasmine Sutphin, as part of the same crime.
The jury deliberated from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. May 29 before returning the two first-degree murder convictions.
The bodies of the victims were found in the ashes of their home near Woodlawn on Dec. 1, 1991. Autopsies showed they had been stabbed to death.
Midkiff confessed when authorities questioned him a few days later, claiming he and Ring were having an affair and that he panicked when she threatened to inform his wife.
Defense attorneys Jonathan Venzie and Fred Werth cited 11 arguments for setting aside the verdict in their written brief, but Mink already had ruled on all of them before, during or after the trial.
Venzie argued that the murder of the girl should be reduced to second-degree because Midkiff, in his confession, had said he cut her as she ran into the room after he had killed her mother. Venzie said Midkiff's statement did not show the premeditation necessary for a first-degree conviction.
Commonwealth's Attorney Greg Goad argued that it was up to the jury to determine whether the murder was first-degree or second-degree. He also cited precedents in the first-degree murder conviction of Stephen Epperly, whose last appeal in the 1980 murder of 18-year-old Radford University student Gina Renee Hall was rejected by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
Hall's body never was found but factors leading to Epperly's conviction included the difference in size between the attacker and victim, and hiding the body.
Goad argued that all these applied in the case of the girl's death, based on medical testimony about the nature of the stab wound, the fact that the victim was a child and that the home was burned in an effort to destroy evidence of the crimes.
Members of the victims' family embraced or shook hands with Goad after Mink imposed the sentences.
by CNB