For the week of March 13 - 19, 2002

Inmate sentenced in murder-for-hire case

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By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer

A Blaine County Jail inmate was sentenced to between three and five years in prison Monday after pleading guilty to soliciting the murder of a confidential informant in a drug case against him.

Louis Eugene Cunningham will serve the sentence on top of four to seven years he will be serving for a recent marijuana trafficking conviction.

Cunningham had been arrested by the FBI on Feb. 7, 2001, as part of a sweep that picked up 11 other alleged drug traffickers in Blaine County. All were convicted.

Sixty years old, balding and soft spoken, Cunningham hardly fits the stereotype of an attempted murderer. But prosecutors alleged that while in jail, he tried to hire a fellow inmate to kill confidential informant Jesus "Chewy" Vega and a Blaine County Sheriff’s detective, both of whom were scheduled to be witnesses against him on charges of delivering a pound and a half of marijuana.

In 5^th District Court in Hailey on March 5, County Prosecuting Attorney Jim Thomas told Judge James May that the state was willing to drop the attempted murder charge relating to the detective in return for Cunningham’s plea of guilty to soliciting the murder of Vega. Thomas said that if convicted of either of the charges, Cunningham faced a possible life sentence due to his status as a habitual felony offender.

Cunningham’s attorney, Bob Pangburn, said his client’s guilty plea was in the form of an Alford plea, under which he did not admit committing the crime but acknowledged that there was enough evidence against him that it was in his interest to make a deal with prosecutors.

That evidence consists of testimony from three jail inmates who said Cunningham tried to hire one of them to kill the two men, as well as secretly taped conversations of some of the conversations between them and Cunningham. However, Pangburn said in court, if the case had gone to trial, he would have challenged the admissibility of that evidence on the grounds that it violated his client’s Sixth Amendment right to have an attorney present when being questioned. He contended that once they had informed on Cunningham, the other inmates were acting as state agents in further talks with him.

Thomas acknowledged that problem, and told the court that a minimum sentence of three additional years should be sufficient for a man who will be at least 67 years old when he is released.

In an interview after the hearing, Pangburn said his client’s Alford plea was based on his insistence that he did not intend to follow through on the murders but was collecting information on the three other inmates. Pangburn said that claim was partly confirmed by the fact that Cunningham told his previous defense attorney early in the discussions that he might have some information of interest to prosecutors.

 

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