A North Little Rock man whose life sentence for killing and sexually mutilating his grandfather was overturned last year by the Arkansas Supreme Court accepted a 50-year sentence Monday, a day before he was scheduled to be retried.
Sean Fincham, 27, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, corpse abuse and kidnapping Monday in the January 2011 killing of Dennie Gregory. In exchange for the pleas, prosecutors recommended the 50-year sentence to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson.
Fincham did not dispute killing Gregory, but he claimed at his March 2012 trial that the slaying was manslaughter, not first-degree murder. He was convicted of murder after telling jurors he “snapped” and beat to death the 65-year-old man he had loved like a father.
“I loved him, and I regret killing him. I didn’t mean to,” he said at the time, saying he had heard that Gregory had molested Fincham’s two children, abuse allegations that triggered overwhelming flashbacks of the sexual abuse he said he endured as a child at the hands of the older man.
Fincham testified that he only remembered hitting Gregory once after the older man brandished some kind of weapon at him. He said he remembered only “flashes” of that evening and had no recollection of how his grandfather came to be mutilated.
The injury was likely inflicted after Gregory was killed, according to medical testimony.
Gregory had been hit in the face at least 21 times, with 11 of those blows in the form of stab wounds, one of them destroying Gregory’s left eye and extending two-thirds of the way through his brain. One blow was delivered with so much force that Gregory’s spinal cord was fractured, which would have left him paralyzed from the shoulders down.
Investigators testified that Gregory’s killing was exceptionally bloody. Gregory’s body was found inside the tiny camper he and Fincham had shared on the parking lot of Bennie Richards’ Auto Sales on Arkansas 161 in the Prothro Junction area. The witness who found the man’s body passed out after making the discovery and could not recall what he had seen, only that he knew that police needed to be called.
At trial, prosecutors argued that there was no evidence that Gregory had molested Fincham’s children, telling jurors that Fincham had taken his time torturing his grandfather, alternating between using a hammer and a drill on the man’s face and head. A piece of chewed candy bar found in the camper showed that Fincham had taken a break from torturing the older man, they said.
Gregory’s only crime was that he regularly nagged his grandson about his shortcomings, particularly when Fincham was seeking cash handouts, prosecutors said at the trial.
But the state Supreme Court overturned Fincham’s conviction in March in a precedent-setting decision based on the appeal brought by Fincham’s attorney, Dan Hancock.
The high court ruled that jury instructions in place at the time needed to be clarified to instruct jurors on how they should consider deciding whether a slaying is manslaughter, which is a deliberate killing committed while the defendant was “under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance for which there is reasonable excuse.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 01/14/2014