 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Double killer says he wants to die Fiebiger says prison is 'torture' Saturday, May 19, 2001 By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Anthony Fiebiger, the Brookline sociopath on death row for two vicious slayings in the 1980s, wants the state to execute him.
Yesterday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, the twice-convicted murderer appeared before Judge David Cercone and formally waived his right to appeal his convictions and his right to legal representation.
"He says he's being tortured in prison by staying in one cell 23 hours a day," said his attorney, H. David Rothman. "He doesn't want his life extended another second. He wants to be executed."
He'll have to wait awhile.
In July 1999, Cercone sentenced Fiebiger to death for the 1989 strangulation of Norma Parker, 53, of Carnegie. In March of that year, a jury sentenced him to death for the 1982 rape and murder of Marcia Jones, 16, of Mount Washington.
Under state law, all death sentences are automatically reviewed by the state Supreme Court to make sure the evidence is sufficient to support the sentence.
Although Fiebiger said he didn't want to appeal, Rothman filed a brief raising other issues, including whether Fiebiger should have been examined by a psychiatrist instead of a psychologist, who is not a medical doctor.
When the Supreme Court heard the case in March and was informed that Fiebiger wants to die, the justices sent the case back to Cercone so Fiebiger's desire to waive his appellate rights could be made on the record.
Now the case will return to the Supreme Court for another review. If the high court affirms the sentence, Gov. Ridge will have the choice to sign a death warrant.
Fiebiger confessed to police in 1998 that he had strangled Parker Feb. 28, 1989. He said she woke him up, so he choked her with his bare hands, a towel and a martial arts weapon until she died.
Then he loaded her body into a plastic, 55-gallon drum he found in an abandoned building next door and buried the body in Mingo Park, Washington County. He later returned and doused her remains with battery acid, apparently to speed decomposition.
Against the advice of his attorneys, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and let Cercone decide the penalty. The judge ruled that the circumstances of Parker's death merited Fiebiger's death.
In the earlier case, Fiebiger and Joseph Morton decided in 1982 to find a woman to rape and ran across Jones on a Mount Washington street. She was raped, sodomized, strangled with her belt, then stabbed in the neck.
Morton is serving life in prison.
|
||||||||
