TERRE HAUTE, Indiana — A federal prisoner scheduled for execution in just over two weeks for the 1994 kidnapping and murder of a St. Croix teenage girl lost a federal appeal case on Friday.
Orlando Cordia Hall, 49, was convicted on multiple charges in the kidnapping, rape and killing of 16-year-old Lisa Rene.
A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rejected his effort to pursue a third appeal.
Hall was one of five men who prosecutors said kidnapped the Crucian teenager from her home in Arlington, Texas, to get revenge on her two brothers for a botched marijuana deal. Over two days, she was gang-raped, beaten with a shovel and buried alive.
The Justice Department announced in September that an execution date of Nov. 19 was ordered.
Hall is Black and his lawyers have in the past noted that an all-white jury recommended his death sentence. That was not an element in Friday’s ruling, however.
According to Friday’s opinion by 5th Circuit Judge James Ho, Hall’s latest argument turned on a complex argument that one of the crimes for which he was convicted — carrying a firearm during a crime of violence — doesn’t stand up under recent Supreme Court precedent, and that his death sentence for the related conviction on a charge of kidnapping resulting in death, should be vacated. The panel rejected that argument in a 2-1 ruling.