Great Bend ? A Kansas judge on Tuesday rejected challenges to the state’s death penalty law raised by the suspect charged with killing a 14-year-old Great Bend teenager last year.

A Great Bend resident has been charged with capital murder and criminal sodomy in the August slaying of the teenager, whose charred body was found at an asphalt plant. If convicted, the suspect could face the death penalty.

Barton County District Judge Hannelore Kitts said she relied on decisions by the Kansas Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court in setting aside motions filed by the suspect’s attorneys, who contend the state’s death penalty is unconstitutional because so-called relaxed evidentiary standards allow the government too much leeway in the type of evidence they can present during the penalty phase of death penalty cases.

Death penalty prosecutions are handled in two phases. First, there’s a trial to determine whether a suspect is guilty. If the person is convicted, the next step is a penalty phase to determine whether the crime warrants a death sentence. In the second phase, jurors consider aggravating factors such as whether a killing was especially heinous and mitigating factors such as whether a defendant lacked a previous significant criminal record.

The defense also challenged the law on the basis that death penalty verdicts are ambiguous and unreliable since they do not require jurors to disclose what they considered in sentencing someone to death and what weight they gave to mitigating evidence.

And, defense attorneys contended the death penalty law has an “impermissible chilling effect” on the defendant’s rights because a defendant may be induced to forgo a trial and plead guilty in order to receive only a life sentence.

Prosecutors cited earlier court decisions that had discounted all those arguments and upheld the constitutionality of the Kansas law, and Kitts said in making her decision that the higher courts had already addressed all those issues.

Her decision was not unexpected — even defense attorneys had noted the motions were filed to preserve the matter for future appeals.

“The court is obviously going to deny those motions,” Kitts said in ruling from the bench

Other defense motions dealing with the use of experts and mitigating evidence were unopposed and were quickly granted. The judge also ordered the suspect to submit a DNA sample for the KBI database.

The state filed a document saying it intends to file motions seeking rulings on the admissibility of statements the suspect made to law enforcement officials and others, along with other evidence collected.

Kitts also reminded attorneys of her earlier gag order prohibiting them from discussing the case.