REPRIEVE.(The Talk of the Town)(Martin Soto-Fong)

Martin Soto-Fong was seventeen years old on June 24, 1992, when three employees of the El Grande Market, in Tucson, Arizona, were gunned down during an apparent robbery. Soto-Fong and two others were convicted and sentenced to death for the murders. Last year, the prosecutor in the case, Kenneth Peasley, was disbarred for misconduct in the course of the various trials stemming from the crimes, and the convictions of Soto-Fong's co-defendants were overturned, although they are still in prison on other charges. Soto-Fong, however, remained on death row, where he has been for more than a decade. (The case was examined in "Killer Instincts," in the January 17, 2005, issue of this magazine.)

Last Tuesday, at around noon, one of the prison's counsellors spoke through the iron mesh on the door to Soto-Fong's cell. "He asked me if I had heard the news, and he told me that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Simmons," Soto-Fong said by telephone last week, referring to the court's decision, by a five-to-four vote, to bar the practice of executing juvenile offenders. Arizona has four such inmates on death row, including Soto-Fong, who is now thirty years old. "I wasn't sure if I could take his word for it, but then later I saw it on the news," Soto-Fong said. "The first thing I thought about was my mother"--who committed suicide five years ago--"and I wept a little bit and wondered what the next step would be."

The prison complex in Florence, Arizona, where Soto-Fong is incarcerated, has one of the most restrictive death rows in the country. Soto-Fong, who is a diminutive, balding man of ...