A Durango man who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1995 murder of a Southern Ute Indian woman may one day go free – but it won’t be for at least 20 years.
Raymond Cain, 38, has spent his entire adult life behind bars for the shooting death of Sadie Frost, 18, and attempted murder of Shawnda Baker, who was 19.
Because he was 17 at the time of the killing, Cain became eligible for parole in accordance with Colorado state law and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year that applies retroactively and prohibits juveniles from being sentenced to life without parole.
District Judge Brian Flynn had two options for resentencing Cain:
He could give him to 30 years to 50 years in prison with credit for time served. Upon completion of the prison term, he would be released on parole.Or he could sentence Cain to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years, meaning Cain must convince a parole board to release him sometime around 2035.Flynn heard from Cain, several lawyers, expert witnesses and family members during a resentencing hearing Oct. 20 -21 in Durango.
In a five-page ruling issued Monday, Flynn confirmed Cain should have a chance at freedom, but he stopped short of setting a guaranteed release date, sentencing Cain instead to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. He also must serve 25 years for trying to kill Baker. With credit for time served and good behavior, it is estimated Cain will be eligible for parole in about 22 years, but lawyers were still trying Monday afternoon to calculate a precise parole date.
The ruling came as a victory to Frost’s mother, Ramona Eagle, who argued for a longer prison sentence. She would rather Cain spend the rest of his life behind bars, but Monday’s ruling was the most favorable outcome considering the new laws, she said.
“She (Sadie Frost) was brought to us by the Creator,” Eagle said. “She was a blessing to both my husband and me. It’s sad that her life was cut so short at someone else’s hands.”
But the ruling came as a huge disappointment to Cain’s defense lawyer, Richard Bednarski, who has worked on various appeals related to Cain’s case for 15 years. He asked Judge Flynn to sentence Cain to 30 years in prison, making him eligible for release in 10 years or less.
“We’re obviously very disappointed in the court’s ruling,” he said. “... In our opinion, the court took a very short-sighted view of Ray and saw him for who, essentially, the prison created rather than seeing him for who was at the time the offense occurred.”
Cain is one of three men convicted of felony murder for the Jan. 31 or Feb. 1, 1995, shooting that killed Frost and wounded Baker. Both women were shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber handgun that was never recovered. The women were found about 7:30 a.m. Feb. 1 in Frost’s car near a power substation behind the Centennial Center in Bodo Industrial Park.
Prosecutors said Cain and his co-defendants, Gabriel Rivera and Forest Porter, robbed Baker of more than $2,000 – about a third of the money given to her by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe as a per-capita payment for her 19th birthday.
Prosecutors have always maintained that Cain pulled the trigger, but that belief is based mainly on statements from his co-defendants, Bednarski said.
In his ruling, Judge Flynn relied on testimony presented by Bill Claspell, an investigator with the Colorado Department of Corrections, who said a third of the 30,000 inmates in the state prison system belong to a gang, and of those, only 10 percent are considered a management problem.
Cain is one them, Claspell said. He holds the rank of “general” – a person who directs gang activity within the prison – for the 211 Crew, which was started in the mid-1990s as a protection group before morphing into a full-fledged gang. The name 211 possibly refers to letters of the alphabet, 2 for B, and 1 for A, or Brotherhood of Aryan Alliance.
The white supremacists gang was connected to the March 19, 2013, slaying of state corrections director Tom Clements. The suspect in the killing died in a shootout with authorities in Texas.
As a result of his gang activity, Cain has been held in administrative segregation for about 10 years of his 20 years behind bars. In 2014, he was moved to a prison in Pennsylvania as part of an interstate compact agreement – a move typically reserved for the “worst of the worse,” Claspell testified.
Even after Cain was transferred, he added a “211 Crew” tattoo in large letters across his upper back – another detail Cain’s defense lawyer disputes, saying Cain got the tattoo many years ago, before the gang became a criminal enterprise.
Cain’s case was the first of about 48 in Colorado involving juveniles who were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Dozens of others are expected to receive resentencing hearings in coming months and years.
Bednarski said Monday he hadn’t yet been able to inform Cain of the ruling, but he expects to do so on Wednesday.
“There is some hope now, which he never had before,” Bednarski said. “I know he’s going to be excited about having that chance for hope; we’re just disappointed it’s so far down the road.”
Eagle said it was nerve-racking to confront her daughter’s killer and to relitigate case, but she offered her encouragement to other families who will have to go through a similar process.
“It was very difficult,” she said. “It was just like opening up an old wound and having to again go through this whole process again and not knowing what was to be expected.”
shane@durangoherald.com
Raymond Cain sentencing order (PDF)
