Killer Argues He's Disabled to Avoid Death Sentence

George Washington University graduate Rachel Raver, 22, was going to go to law school at the University of Virginia. Her boyfriend Warren Fulton III, also 22, was captain of the baseball team at George Washington University.

Their lives were cut short in 1988 by Alfredo Prieto, who shot both Raver and Fulton on a stretch of Hunter Mill Road near Reston. Their murders were a mystery until 2005. Prieto was on California’s death row for raping and killing a 15-year-old girl, when a DNA sample entered into a national database in 2005 connected him to the Virginia slayings.

He was brought to Virginia and sentenced to death in Fairfax County for the murders of Raver and Fulton.

Prieto is appealing his death sentence, saying he can’t be executed because he is intellectually disabled. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Florida case that a cutoff on IQ test scores can’t be used to determine whether someone is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. Prieto, whose IQ has been measured both above and below cutoffs, says that ruling precludes his execution.

Now a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considering Prieto’s appeal is focusing on Prieto’s so-called “adaptive functioning,” the Associated Press reported. Adaptive functioning is the ability to deal with normal activities like handling money, holding down a job and maintaining personal relationships.

During the recent hearing by the panel, Senior Assistant Attorney General Alice T. Armstrong said there was “voluminous evidence” that Prieto fails to meet the intellectual disability test, including that he is bilingual, had drivers’ licenses from two states, operated heavy machinery and handled his own banking, the AP reported.

“Essentially what’s going on here is he wants a do-over from what the jury determined in 2008. This court doesn’t do that,” Armstrong said.

Prieto’s lawyer, Miriam Airington, said the factors cited by Armstrong were outweighed by testimony from several witnesses who described Prieto as an extremely slow learner. Executing him would be “a fundamental miscarriage of justice,” the AP reported her as saying.

The 4th U.S. Circuit usually takes several weeks to issue an opinion, the AP story noted.

Prieto lost a lawsuit against the Commonwealth over its death row solitary confinement policy.

PHOTO of Prieto courtesy of Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office