The Alaska Court of Appeals has upheld the sentence of James Coday, who murdered an Anchorage painting contractor at Fred Meyer in 2006.
Simone Kim had been working at Fred Meyer when Coday walked up to him with a sawed-off rifle and shot him four times in the back as he lay curled on the ground.
In 2007, Coday was sentenced to 101 years in prison, ineligible for parole until 2046.
Coday appealed his conviction, but the appeals court confirmed the conviction.
Coday appealed again, on grounds of ineffective representation. In court documents, he said his attorney was ineffective because he failed to obtain psychological testing as part of an argument to obtain a lighter sentence.
An Alaska Superior Court judge rejected Coday’s argument, and in an opinion dated Jan. 11, the appeals court sided with the superior court.
“(Court) documents suggest that Coday may have been suffering from some mental health issues, possibly drug related, at the time of the shooting,” the appeals court wrote, then added, “but they do not, standing alone, show that his attorney was incompetent for concluding that he did not have a meritorious mental disease or defect defense that he could have raised at trial.”
