KETCHIKAN, Alaska -- A southeast Alaska woman convicted as a teenager of criminal negligent homicide in the death of her mother was properly tried as an adult, the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled.
Rachelle Waterman of Craig was correctly held to an adult standard, the court said. Judges in an opinion Friday also said Alaska's uniform definition of criminal negligence, regardless of age, is constitutional, the Ketchikan Daily News reported.
"She was prosecuted as an adult, because the Alaska Legislature has expressly declared that when a person is charged with murder (or one of several other serious felonies), adult criminal responsibility begins at age 16 rather than age 18," the court wrote.
Waterman was 16 in 2004 when her mother, Lauri Waterman, was found dead on Prince of Wales Island. Rachelle Waterman and her father were out of town when Lauri Waterman died.
Two of Rachelle Waterman's former boyfriends, Brian Radel and Jason Arrant, who were 24 at the time, confessed to the murder in the high-profile case. According to prosecutors, the men kidnapped Lauri Waterman, drove her out of town, beat her to death and attempted to stage a car crash by driving her van off the road and setting it on fire.
Rachelle Waterman, according to prosecutors, told the men her mother had beat her and that she wanted her mother dead. Rachelle Waterman also failed to warn her mother after an earlier planned attack did not occur, according to prosecutors.
Rachelle Waterman was acquitted of murder, conspiracy and kidnapping charges. She was convicted in 2011 of criminally negligent homicide, which requires the state to prove a person failed to foresee a risk of death to such a degree that it constituted a gross deviation from what a reasonable person would observe, according to the Appeals Court.
Waterman's attorney argued that the teenager's brain was still developing in 2004 and she should have been held to a different standard of negligence than an adult.