CONWAY -- For the first time in almost 30 years, a Faulkner County jury on Wednesday sentenced a capital-murder defendant to death.
The circuit court jury convicted Scotty Ray Gardner a day earlier in the 2016 strangulation of his girlfriend in a Conway motel.
As the jury foreman read the sentence aloud Wednesday, Gardner leaned back in his chair and stroked his long, gray goatee. The 57-year-old Gardner did not stand for the verdict in the death of Susan Heather Stubbs, who was 41. He also did not join his attorneys and others in standing when the judge entered or left the small courtroom.
Gardner seemed to listen when Judge Charles Clawson Jr. formally handed down the sentence of death by lethal injection and said he would later set an execution date. When Clawson asked if Gardner had any questions, the defendant, wearing a long-sleeved, wrinkled white shirt and dark pants, shook his head and said he did not.
The courtroom was silent as relatives of Gardner sat on one side and relatives of the victim sat on the other. Upon adjournment, officers handcuffed Gardner, who had been free of restraints during the trial. His brother, seated a few rows behind him, bent over as a woman comforted him and as another woman sobbed.
Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Carol Crews met with Stubbs' relatives outside the courtroom. Stubbs' parents were among them. So was Stubbs' adult daughter, Victoria Smith, who had her 4-month-old daughter with her. The baby shares her grandmother's middle name, Heather. Stubbs' 14-year-old son, Kameron Brinkley, was also in the courtroom. Another son, Keagan Brinkley, 17, was not in court Wednesday.
Jurors deliberated just 12 minutes Tuesday before finding Gardner guilty of capital murder. Sentencing deliberations Wednesday lasted about an hour.
The last time a Faulkner County jury sentenced someone to death was in 1989 when Kenneth Ray Clements was convicted of capital murder for the 1988 shooting of Conway police officer Ray Noblitt. In 1990, though, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a new trial. In 1991, Clements was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Stubbs was slain on March 6, 2016, at the Days Inn motel room on Conway's Oak Street, where Stubbs and Gardner had been living.
Gardner's attorneys presented no witnesses in either the guilt or the sentencing phases of the trial.
Prosecution witnesses included two former wives of Gardner. He had gone to prison for trying to kill one of the former spouses decades ago. He wrote the other ex-wife, Jewel McGinty, a letter in which he talked about Stubbs' killing, prosecutors said. He also talked to McGinty by phone from jail in a tape-recorded call.
Crews told jurors Wednesday that Gardner's actions reflected the aggravated factors essential for the death penalty. His actions were cruel, depraved and caused Stubbs to suffer physically and mentally in her final moments as he grabbed a hair dryer and wrapped the cord around her neck so tightly that it broke away from the dryer, Crews said.
Crews reminded jurors how Gardner had told McGinty of the killing and how he had been determined to keep Stubbs from going to the police about his violence. "All she had to do was shut up. She got what she deserved," Crews said, invoking Gardner's statements to McGinty.
Gardner also showed "complete indifference" after the killing, Crews said. He robbed Stubbs of money and a phone, then "put on a fedora ... and made it to" a casino in Hot Springs.
Katherine Streett with the Arkansas Public Defender Commission told jurors that she was not going to argue about the aggravating factors that the prosecution had stressed in Gardner's case. Rather, she said, she hoped jurors would not use Gardner's behavior as a standard by which to punish him.
But in a rebuttal, deputy prosecutor John Hout asked why jurors should "give him [Gardner] the consideration that he didn't give anybody else."
Death-penalty cases are automatically appealed.
Sentencing came after the prosecutors called three witnesses Wednesday -- Stubbs' daughter and father, and Sue Orndorff, the ex-wife whom Gardner tried to kill in 1990.
Orndorff testified that she and Gardner were married about three years and that she was six months pregnant when Gardner shot her seven times in Arkansas County. She gave birth to a son, who is now 27.
Gardner was convicted of first-degree battery, second-degree escape and criminal attempted murder in the first degree for that attack. He went to prison Oct. 31, 1991, and was released on parole Dec. 4, 2014. He'd been in prison once before, from December 1986 until September 1989.
One of Stubbs' sisters, Terri Adkison of Conway, said after the trial that she hoped the case would raise awareness of domestic violence and "open the eyes of any women who are on the fence about whether to leave or not" when a man is violent.
Public court records showed that Stubbs had sought an order of protection against Gardner in January 2016 after she told police the previous month that Gardner "had been verbally and physically abusing her," according to a police report. Court records showed the petition was dismissed when Stubbs failed to appear in court as scheduled Feb. 9, 2016.
State Desk on 08/23/2018