GALVESTON, Texas, April 16 (UPI) -- A couple charged in Texas with killing the woman's 2-year-old daughter will not face the death penalty, a prosecutor said Wednesday.
Kurt Sistrunk, district attorney in Galveston, said he believes that if Royce Ziegler II and Kimberly Trenor are sentenced to death those sentences would be reversed on appeal, the Galveston Daily News reports. Instead, he plans to ask for a sentence of life without parole.
"I'm not in office to make decisions based on popular emotion," he said. "If emotions were the deciding factor today, we wouldn't be doing this."
A fisherman found the body of Riley Sawyers in a box in Galveston Bay in October. The toddler was nicknamed "Baby Grace" until the body was identified.
The family of Riley's biological father in Ohio told KHOU-TV in Houston that the death penalty would be "too easy a punishment."
Trenor allegedly confessed that she and Ziegler held the toddler underwater in a bathtub and that he threw her across the room.
