BOISE, ID – A Latah County man who was sentenced to life in prison for the 2010 murder of his estranged wife will remain in prison. The Idaho State Appeals Court has ruled against 61-year-old Charles Capone after he filed an appeal alleging the district court erred by summarily dismissing his third amended petition for post-conviction relief.
Capone was convicted of first-degree murder in Latah County Second District Court for murdering 40-year-old Rachael Anderson of Clarkston. She disappeared on April 16, 2010. He was sentenced in 2014 to life in prison without parole. In addition, he received 20 years in prison for failure to notify law enforcement of a death and conspiracy for failure to notify law enforcement of a death.
Capone’s co-defendant, David Stone, testified that he saw Capone strangle Anderson at Capone’s repair shop in Moscow and then helped dump her body off the Red Wolf Crossing Bridge into the Snake River in Clarkston. Stone received a sentence of seven years in prison.
Capone was considered the prime suspect in Anderson’s disappearance. Following his alleged attempted strangulation of Anderson on December 27, 2009, she filed for divorce from Capone after just three months of marriage. Capone has a history of domestic violence. In 1997 he allegedly threatened to break into the home of a Moscow doctor. He also threatened to rape her and her daughter, and then kill himself. In 2006, Capone also allegedly stood over his ex-wife in Florida and threatened to kill her.
The Appeals Court says Capone’s third amended petition raised various constitutional challenges to his criminal conviction for murder, including prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance of counsel claims.
“Capone argues all his claims were properly brought in his post-conviction case and alleged a genuine issue of material fact such that they should not have been summarily dismissed,” the Court of Appeals says in its unpublished opinion. “All of Capone’s prosecutorial misconduct claims are forfeited pursuant to Idaho Code § 19-4901(b) because they could have been raised on direct appeal and they do not fall within the exception to this general rule provided by the statute. Alternatively, none of the prosecutorial misconduct claims allege a genuine issue of material fact. Capone’s claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel is disproved by the record and, therefore, fails to allege a genuine issue of material fact.”
The court says the district court did not err, and the judgment summarily dismissing Capone’s third amended petition for post-conviction relief is affirmed.
“Capone’s prosecutorial misconduct claims could have been raised on direct appeal and he failed to show by way of substantial evidence that any of the claims met the statutory exception to forfeiture. Even if reviewed on the merits, Capone failed to allege a genuine issue of material fact regarding any of the elements of his claims,” the appeals court’s opinion says.
Capone is being held in the Idaho State Correctional Center in Boise.
Rachael Anderson
