A judge is expected to throw out the 2011 aggravated murder conviction of Angela McAnulty, the only woman on Oregon’s death row, for the torture and starvation of her 15-year-old daughter, Jeanette Maples.

McAnulty should get a new trial because her attorneys failed to adequately represent or advise her during her trial, Senior Circuit Court Judge J. Burdette Pratt said in a draft ruling.

Pratt has yet to finalize and sign the ruling, but The Oregonian/OregonLive received a preliminary copy. The judge’s underlying finding isn’t expected to change.

Among major lapses cited by the judge: Defense attorneys Steven Krasik and Kenneth Hadley, both experienced capital punishment lawyers, made the highly unusual move of encouraging McAnulty to plead guilty when the prosecution hadn’t agreed drop the death penalty as a possible punishment, the judge said. After a 15-day trial to determine McAnulty’s sentence, 12 jurors unanimously chose the death penalty.

McAnulty is among 30 people on death row. Executions have been put on hold ever since then-Gov. John Kitzhaber instituted a moratorium in 2011. Gov. Kate Brown extended it during her tenure.

McAnulty’s case is one of the most notorious in modern Oregon history. Pratt noted the evidence was “particularly gruesome” and that even one of McAnulty’s trial attorneys “described it as the most indefensible case he had ever handled.”

According to prosecutors, McAnulty singled out Jeanette to beat and starve while allowing her other two children to sit at a table to eat dinner and watch TV or play video games. Prosecutors said Jeanette’s blood was found in every room in the house and that her mother used a vacuum cleaner to drown out the sound of the beatings.

The teenager suffered open wounds so deep that one of them exposed her hip bones, prosecutors said, and her only possession was a piece of cardboard she used for a bed.

Jeanette Maples was 15 when she was found dead in her Eugene home. (Submitted photo)

The girl’s teachers and classmates in Eugene noticed she was skinny and always hungry. She later wrote a letter to a school official, saying she was denied food at home, forced to eat chili peppers and ordered to sit on her knees for long periods as punishment.

The Oregon Department of Human Services investigated by visiting the home, but found it well stocked and closed the case without taking action to protect Jeanette. The girl’s emaciated and battered body was found in the family’s home in 2009.

Her stepfather, Richard McAnulty, pleaded guilty to aggravated murder for his role in the death and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of release after 25 years.

In 2012, the state agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit for the Department of Human Services’ failure to protect the teenager. Most of the settlement went to her biological father.

In 2014, the Oregon Supreme Court upheld McAnulty’s conviction.

In the draft ruling, Pratt wrote that McAnulty’s defense team was rushed in preparing for trial on Feb. 1, 2011. Less than 1 ½ months earlier, one of the defense attorneys and his investigator had finished a 114-day trial of a father and son who were convicted of killing two police officers in the 2008 bombing of a Woodburn bank.

The attorneys had asked a Lane County Circuit judge to postpone McAnulty’s trial, but were denied. Pratt found that the time crunch affected their ability to call skilled mental health experts who could have tried to counter the picture painted by the prosecution of McAnulty as a cold-blooded killer. Experts could have testified, for instance, how McAnulty’s parenting was affected by her own abusive childhood decades earlier and that her lower-than-average intelligence and mental illness affected her decisions, the judge said.

Such testimony could have shown that McAnulty was “not simply evil. ... Jurors were never provided with neuropsychological evidence to assist them in understanding the origins and causes of Petitioner’s behavior,” Pratt wrote.

According to previous coverage of McAnulty’s life, she lost her mother to murder when she was 5. After high school, she abused drugs while living a tumultuous life traveling around with a carnival worker. She had three children, but all were taken by California authorities because of abuse or neglect. McAnulty became a mother to two more children and ultimately was able to win back custody of one of her older children, Jeanette.

It’s unclear when Pratt will issue his final opinion granting McAnulty, now 50, a new trial. Portland defense attorneys Kathleen Correll, Bert Dupre and Gregory Scholl represented McAnulty in her case requesting post-conviction relief. They declined comment.

Representatives from the Lane County prosecutor’s office and the Oregon Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Krasik, one of McAnulty’s original trial attorneys, said he’s relieved to hear of the judge’s draft opinion.

“This is a welcome step towards a fair and rational disposition of this tragic case,” Krasik said Tuesday in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I support any court decision that undoes Angela’s misguided, horribly disproportionate, death sentence.”

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

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