AG Curtis Hill asks U.S. Supreme Court to ensure justice for 4-year-old girl and mother who were brutally slain

Attorney General Curtis Hill announced today he has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence of Fredrick Baer, a man convicted of brutally slashing to death a 4-year-old girl and her young mother.

“One of the most foundational functions of my office is to secure justice throughout the appeals process on behalf of crime victims,” Attorney General Hill said. “This mission is particularly critical with brutal and vicious crimes such as Fredrick Baer’s animalistic attack on an unsuspecting mother and her little girl. It would be a miscarriage of justice for the death sentence in this case to be overturned now, after Baer has been on death row for 13 years, and I’ll do everything within my authority to prevent such an odious outcome.”

The details of Baer’s crime are harrowing:

On Feb. 25, 2004, after already contemplating raping another woman he randomly spotted, Baer saw a young woman named Cory Clark taking trash to the curb at her home near Lapel, Indiana. He stopped and parked his car.

After Ms. Clark went back inside her home, Baer walked up to the woman’s house and knocked on the door. The first person to answer was 4-year-old Jenna Clark; the girl’s mother appeared moments thereafter. Baer asked if he could borrow a phone. Showing kindness to a stranger, Cory Clark offered him her phone and stepped back into her house, leaving Baer on the porch to presumably make a call.

Baer – as he later recounted to a court-appointed psychologist – stood on the porch weighing whether to proceed with raping the woman. Then he walked into the home, where a startled Cory Clark began screaming. Baer pulled a knife, grabbed Ms. Clark by the head, ordered her to shut up and forced her into her bedroom.

Wondering what was happening, little Jenna came down the hall looking for her mother. Baer blocked the closed door with his body and ordered Ms. Clark to tell her little girl to go away. Nonetheless, Jenna kept pushing against the door.

Rather than continuing with his initial plan to rape Cory Clark, Baer instead forced her into a kneeling position and slit her throat. Jenna Clark then burst into the bedroom to the sight of her murdered mother’s mutilated body.

Screaming, the child ran toward her own bedroom, but Baer gave chase – catching the girl and slicing her throat, nearly decapitating her.

After killing his victims, Baer took money from Cory Clark’s purse, collected some decorative rocks as souvenirs from his exploits and drove to his job at a construction site. He told co-workers he was late because he had gotten lost. Then he handed another crew member some cash and asked the co-worker to go buy him hamburgers.

After being convicted of murder, attempted rape and theft, Baer was sentenced to death. His convictions and sentence were twice affirmed by the Indiana Supreme Court, and a federal district court denied Baer’s request for habeas corpus. Now, several years later, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Baer was entitled to habeas relief in the form of a new penalty phase of his trial – effectively sending the case back to Madison Circuit Court for a redo of sentencing.

Attorney General Hill sought to obtain an en banc rehearing of the matter – that is, the full court’s review of the three-judge panel’s ruling – but was rebuffed by the court. Taking this case to the U.S Supreme Court, Attorney General Hill noted that no one disputes Baer’s guilt or the basic facts of his horrendous crime.

The primary issue is a closing statement made by the prosecuting attorney, Attorney General Hill writes in the attached petition, that “Baer’s rough upbringing did not diminish the enormity of his crime: the brutal murder of a young mother and her four-year-old daughter. The prosecutor made the point by informing the jury of his own tough childhood and observing that, although his mother was a prostitute who succumbed to a drug overdose, he still became a county prosecutor.”

The petition adds, “The Seventh Circuit seized on this remark and granted Baer habeas relief, concluding that Baer received constitutionally inadequate assistance . . .  because his counsel did not allege prosecutorial misconduct or challenge certain jury instructions.”

In the attached petition, Attorney General Hill asks the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the Seventh Circuit violated the deferential review requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act by disregarding the reasoned decision of the Indiana Supreme Court.