Langin escapes death penalty in murder of 3-year-old girl

Christopher Langin escaped the death penalty Monday in the shocking 2005 murder of his best friend's 3-year-old daughter.

Jurors, who started deliberating on Nov. 4, gave Langin life in prison.

Judge Teresa Sanders is scheduled to sentence Langin on Dec. 11 to life in prison, either without possibility of parole or after 35 years in prison.

The deliberations, spread over parts of seven days, were in contrast to the other phases of the trial. Jurors took 1½ days to find Langin guilty of first-degree murder on Sept. 24 in the slaying of Angelene Plummer, 3.

It took jurors only 45 minutes on Sept. 29 to find Angelene's murder was committed in a cruel, heinous or depraved manner, making Langin eligible for the death penalty.

Angelene's murder on Feb. 8, 2005, shocked the Valley. The developmentally disabled child was still unable to talk other than a few scattered words and still wore a diaper.

Michael Plummer, Angelene's father, allowed Langin to babysit his daughter unsupervised for nearly 24 hours in a fetid trailer behind the family's cramped home in a county island east of Mesa.

"I found her lying beaten and very bruised," Plummer testified during the trial. "She was bruised from head to toe. It looked like she had been run over."

A separate jury found Plummer guilty of child abuse for allowing Langin to babysit Angelene, despite Langin's history of drug and alcohol abuse. A judge sentenced Plummer to 18 years in prison.

Firefighters and deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office were so moved by Angelene's plight that they paid for her funeral and burial.

Defense attorney Joey Hamby pleaded with jurors to have mercy on his client, saying that a defense psychiatrist had testified that Langin was suffering from a "methamphetamine psychosis" during the time of Angelene's beating death.

He said Langin was raised in a family with several alcoholics and drug addicts and had been introduced to drug abuse by his own mother.

Christopher Langin escaped the death penalty Monday in the shocking 2005 murder of his best friend's 3-year-old daughter, Angelene Plummer.