(Reuters) - A Montana bride appealing a murder conviction for pushing her new husband off a cliff said on Monday her life sentence should be overturned partly because prosecutors claimed she blindfolded her mate before he plunged to his death but failed to prove it.
In court documents filed on Monday with a federal appeals court, Jordan Graham said through her attorney that prosecutors wrongly argued she should go to prison for life because she plotted the death of her newlywed husband before shoving him off a cliff at Glacier National Park in 2013.
Graham later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder tied to Cody Johnson's death and was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a federal judge who refused to let her withdraw a guilty plea secured under a deal with prosecutors that saw them dismiss a first-degree murder charge, which alleges premeditation.
Graham appealed the conviction in October, saying that prosecutors distorted facts and acted vindictively toward her during the trial. Prosecutors responded in January by saying the former nanny had no grounds for appeal since she lied to officials and used trickery in trying to conceal her crime.
Then in the latest round of filings to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Graham's lawyer complained that prosecutors had improperly used the claim that she used a blindfold to persuade a federal grand jury to hand down a first-degree murder indictment and then largely abandoned the issue until raising it again during sentencing.
"The cloth itself is mentioned one time in passing, but otherwise 'poof' it is gone," defense attorney Michael Donahoe wrote about prosecutors' written statements of fact in the case.
Donahoe also said the government's argument that his client deserved life for lying to police, friends and relatives about her husband's disappearance was not sufficient cause for her severe punishment.
He acknowledged that Graham engaged in a "somewhat shameful manner" after the incident but said that was because she feared authorities might not buy her account that she accidentally shoved her husband off a cliff during a marital dispute while climbing a steep trail at Glacier.
Graham told an FBI agent of that fear in a "delicious irony" that "turned out to prefigure almost exactly what would follow in this prosecution," Donahoe told the court in legal documents.
Prosecutors did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)
