Her 22yo death row conviction overturned by appeal

A federal appeals court on Thursday threw out the convictions of a woman sentenced to death in the notorious 1989 killing of her 4-year-old son, ruling that the case was tainted by a detective with a history of lying under oath.
The ruling marked a surprising turn in a case that made national headlines with the brazen and gruesome nature of the crime. Prosecutors said Debra Jean Milke dressed up her son Christopher in his favorite outfit and told him he was going to see Santa Claus at a mall during the holidays.
Instead, he was taken into the desert by her boyfriend and another man and shot three times in the back of the head as part of what prosecutors said was a plot by Milke and the two other defendants to collect a $50,000 life insurance policy.
Milke would have been the first woman executed in Arizona since the 1930s had her appeals run out. The Arizona Supreme Court had gone so far to issue a death warrant for Milke in 1997, but the execution was delayed because she had yet to exhaust federal appeals.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the prosecution failed to disclose information about a history of misconduct by a detective who testified that Milke confessed to plotting her son’s murder.
That record included multiple court rulings in other cases that former Detective Armando Saldate Jr. either lied under oath or violated suspects’ Miranda rights during interrogations. More