State v. Simonsen

This criminal case is before us on automatic review of defendant’s conviction for aggravated murder and a sentence of death. Defendant assigns error to the trial court’s refusal to allow him to withdraw his guilty pleas and also challenges the death sentence that the court entered in his third sentencing-phase proceeding. We affirm the judgment of conviction and the sentence of death.

I. FACTS

On September 3, 1988, the bodies of two women were found in a remote area near Coquille. Both women, who had been dead for two or three days, were nude from the waist down. They had been tied together at…