DES MOINES, IA — Benjamin Schreiber died four years ago, but his death was short-lived. His heart was restarted five times, and Schreiber is as alive today as the other inmates at the Iowa State Penitentiary, where he’s serving a life sentence for murder.
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Still, Schreiber argued that to an appeals court that his momentary death should have ended his life sentence. He was sentenced to life without parole, “but not to life plus one day,” his lawyers wrote in the petition, arguing now he’s illegally imprisoned.
No, a three-judge panel of the Iowa Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday, it doesn’t work that way.
“Schreiber is either still alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is actually dead, in which case this appeal is moot,” Judge Amanda Potterfield wrote in the appeals court opinion.
The unusual petition for post-conviction relief ended up before the appeals court after his lawyers appealed a ruling by a Wapello County judge who agreed with lawyers for the state that the 66-year-old Schreiber is very much alive and must continue serving his sentence for bludgeoning a southeast Iowa man to death in 1996.
The inmate was hospitalized in March 2015 after he developed septic poisoning from large kidney stones. He was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital, and doctors brought him back to life against his express wishes in a “do not resuscitate” order. His lawyers claimed that violated his due process rights, but neither the appeals court nor the lower court addressed that aspect of his appeal.
Schreiber was arrested in 1996 and charged with the death of 39-year-old John Dale Terry, whose badly beaten body was found near an abandoned trailer near Agency, Iowa. Prosecutors said he had plotted with Terry’s girlfriend to bet the man to death with the wooden handle of a pickax.
He was convicted in 1997 of first-degree murder, which in Iowa carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
The petition before the appeals court was Schreiber’s third attempt to get out of his life sentence. In 2008, the same appeals court declined to overturn Schreiber’s conviction after he argued his sentence was illegal and that he hadn’t been adequately represented by his lawyers.
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