Denver

Bible-reading jury’s death penalty tossed

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday threw out the death penalty in a rape-and-murder case because jurors had studied Bible verses such as “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” during deliberations.

On a 3-2 vote, justices ordered Robert Harlan to serve life in prison without parole for kidnapping 25-year-old cocktail waitress Rhonda Maloney in 1994, raping her at gunpoint for two hours and then fatally shooting her.

The jurors in Harlan’s 1995 trial sentenced him to die, but defense lawyers discovered five of them had looked up Bible verses, copied them down and talked about them while deliberating a sentence behind closed doors.

The Supreme Court said “at least one juror in this case could have been influenced by these authoritative passages to vote for the death penalty when he or she may otherwise have voted for a life sentence.”

New York

Arrests made for tattoo on teen’s forehead

Authorities have jailed two men after they allegedly held down a teenager and tattooed an obscene phrase onto his forehead.

Police in Norwich, about 60 miles south of Syracuse, wouldn’t identify the phrase, saying only that it was vulgar and offensive.

Kenneth Peer, 23, of South New Berlin, and a 17-year-old from Earlville were being held in lieu of $25,000 bail on charges of felony assault and unlawful imprisonment.

Cops said they used a homemade tattoo gun to embed the obscenity in black ink in the skin of the 17-year-old victim’s forehead.

The teen walked into the police station Friday to report the crime, and police arrested the suspects Saturday.

The teen, whose name wasn’t released, will need plastic surgery or a laser process to remove the ink, police said.

Washington, D.C.

Former diplomats oppose U.N. nominee

Challenging the White House, 59 former American diplomats are urging the Senate to reject John R. Bolton’s nomination to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“He is the wrong man for this position,” they said in a letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Indiana Republican has scheduled hearings on Bolton’s nomination for April 7.

“We urge you to reject that nomination,” the former diplomats said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

Their criticism dwelled primarily on Bolton’s stand on issues as the State Department’s senior arms control official. They said he had an “exceptional record” of opposing U.S. efforts to improve national security through arms control.

But the former diplomats also chided Bolton for his “insistence that the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States.”