OKLAHOMA CITY – Citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals vacated the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence a Stephens County man received six years ago.
Miles Sterling Bench, 30, challenged the jurisdiction of Stephens County to prosecute him, for two reasons:
• He has 1/64 quantum Choctaw blood and is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, and therefore is deemed to be a Native American.
• The “despicable crime” (as the appellate court described it) of which Bench was convicted occurred in Velma,
within the boundaries of the Chickasaw Nation, whose reservation was never disestablished by Congress.
While Article 7 of the Oklahoma Constitution vests the district courts of this state with “unlimited original jurisdiction of all justiciable matters,” the federal government has pre-empted the field as it relates to major crimes committed by or against Native Americans in “Indian Country,” the Court of Criminal Appeals noted in its decision overturning Bench’s conviction.
The case was sent back to Stephens County District Court on May 6 with instructions to vacate the conviction and dismiss the case. However, the order was stayed for 20 days.
Meanwhile, on April 14 a federal complaint charging Bench with kidnapping resulting in death was filed in the Western District federal court in Oklahoma City.
In a related issue, Attorney General Mike Hunter has asked the Supreme Court of the United States to (1) grant the State of Oklaho- ma concurrent jurisdiction over crimes committed by non-Native Americans against Native Americans, and (2) not throw out old convictions that the State of Oklahoma prosecuted prior to the SCOTUS McGirt decision last July, said Alex Gerszewski, Hunter’s communications director.
BENCH CONVICTED OF BRUTAL SLAYING
A Stephens County jury convicted Bench in 2015 of the vicious murder of 16-year-old Braylee Rae Henry three years earlier.
Law enforcement officers were contacted the night of June 6, 2012, by a patron who entered a convenience store in Velma and found the store unattended. The patron discovered a pool of blood in the storeroom and blood drops and smears “through the store and out the front door,” a law enforcement officer stated in an affidavit.
At that time Bench had been a clerk at the store for about three weeks, records reflect.
The Velma Police Department was contacted by Miss Henry’s mother when the teenager didn’t return from an errand, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit. The girl had gone to the grocery store to get an item for her mother, then stopped at the convenience store to buy some candy and a soda fountain drink, the affidavit relates.
While investigators were at the store, Miss Henry’s father reported her and her car missing.
Since Bench lived with his grandparents at their home outside of Velma, Stephens County sheriff’s deputies went to the grandparents’ residence “for a welfare check,” looking for Bench, the FBI agent’s affidavit relates.
The deputies were told that their grandson had grabbed some clothes and left.
Sometime later Braylee Ray Henry’s battered body was found in a semi-secluded pasture on the grandparents’ land.
OnStar vehicle safety/security system was contacted about locating the girl’s car. Bench was driving the vehicle when he was stopped on Interstate 40 near Clinton by a Custer County sheriff’s deputy about 1:45 a.m. June 7, 2012, and was taken into custody. Bench was wearing bloody clothing at the time and blood was found in the victim’s vehicle, investigators testified.
Subsequently Bench allegedly told a mental health specialist that he attacked Miss Henry while she was filling a cup at the soda fountain, strangled, beat and kicked her.
In seeking the death sentence, District Attorney Jason Hicks wrote that the murder was “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel...”
Bench “used his fists to beat” the girl “about her head and body” and “used his feet to stomp” her “to the point that it caused her death.” Consequently, Miss Henry “suffered acute blunt force trauma to the head, neck and torso and extremities...”
The penalty upon conviction of a federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death is capital punishment or life in prison plus a $250,000 fine. However, whether Bench could be executed if convicted in federal court is unclear.
Chris Wilson, first assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Oklahoma, confirmed to the Ledger last year that – as a general rule – in the federal judicial system, capital punishment cannot be imposed on a Native American convicted of committing murder in Indian Country unless the tribe has ‘opted in’ to the death penalty. Of the 39 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, only the Sac & Fox Nation sanctions capital punishment, Wilson said.
MURDERER HAS CHECKERED PAST
According to records filed by Hicks, Bench has a checkered past.
A document filed by the prosecutor claimed that Bench was reprimanded on several occasions for “inappropriate behavior” toward female students while he at- tended school in Wilmington, Ill., and “was known to inappropriately touch” his female classmates while attending high schools in Ada and Davis.
Bench was arrested in Illinois in 2008 for alleged domestic assault and battery upon his stepfather, Hicks reported.
In 2011 Bench was arrested in Illinois for being in possession of a stolen vehicle, went AWOL from the Navy and was discharged from the service due to misconduct, Hicks wrote: continued failure to follow the rules and not being truthful to commanding officers.
Later that year Bench was arrested in Ada for shoplifting, Hicks added.
As of Tuesday, Bench was incarcerated in the state penitentiary at McAlester.