SPENCER, Iowa (AP) - One of 10 people involved in the 1997 kidnapping and slaying of a northwest Iowa teenager won’t learn until later this month how much longer he must remain in an Iowa prison.
Judge David Lester has set a May 16 hearing on the resentencing of 32-year-old Ryan Wedebrand. He was 16 in June 1997 when 15-year-old Gregory Sky Erickson was kidnapped from a Spencer apartment, tortured and then fatally shot at an abandoned farmhouse in southern Minnesota.
Wedebrand’s request for resentencing follows a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional to automatically sentence teenagers to life without the chance of parole.
The mother of the slain boy said Tuesday at a hearing that Wedebrand didn’t deserve anything less than life in prison.
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