The Arizona Court of Appeals has affirmed the first-degree murder conviction and life sentence of King Nathaniel Raffa Yates for brutally killing his cellmate at the Pima County jail while awaiting trial for shooting his wife to death months earlier.
The appellate decision released Oct. 27 found no record of fundamental error with the jury trial nor sentence connected to Yates’ murder of Brenden Roth on April 19, 2017. The ruling comes as Roth’s family prepares for trial in an $11 wrongful death lawsuit filed against Pima County and its sheriff’s office.
Chief Judge Garye Vasquez wrote in the unanimous appellate decision that a review undertaken of Yates’ case “in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict” showed there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s finding of guilt.
“The victim, who died of strangulation, also sustained blunt force injuries to his head and neck, contusions and lacerations to his face, a fractured jaw, loose teeth, and contusions and abrasions to his arms and legs,” Vasquez wrote. “The victim was not strangled by hand, but could have been strangled with a strip of a bed sheet; a strip of the sheet from Yates’s bunk was noted as missing.”
The decision also noted surveillance video in the jail showed Yates and Roth leave their cell on the morning of the murder to retrieve their breakfast trays. Roth, who was in jail on a minor theft charge, later returned the trays and went back to the cell.
The video, Vasquez wrote, “revealed no other inmate movement to or from their cell, to which the door had otherwise remained secure.”
The central question to the Roth family’s lawsuit is Pima County’s detention housing policies which led to Yates and Roth being placed in a cell together. The family alleges jail officials breached a duty to protect Roth from inmates like Yates who have a record of violence.
Court records show Yates was booked into the Pima County jail in November 2016 after a friend found Cassandra Yates dead of a gunshot wound in the couple’s kitchen. Yates was standing next to the body while wiping a gun with a towel and reportedly made incriminating comments about the shooting.
Yates and Cassandra, who were married in 2014, had a history of domestic violence related police contacts. One incident in 2015 involved Yates stabbing Cassandra in the neck, then dropping her off at a Tucson hospital.
Most of those incidents did not result in prosecution even if Yates was arrested, in part because of the wife’s reticence. He was back in custody in early November after a handgun was found in a car he was riding in. Yates, as a convicted felon, was prohibited from possessing firearms.
But just four days later, Cassandra bailed her husband out of jail. She was killed on Nov. 20, 2016.
Yates was initially deemed incompetent to stand trial in the case but was later ruled competent after participating in a court-ordered restoration to competency program. A jury in February 2020 took less than two hours of deliberations to find him guilty of his wife’s murder.
That conviction and life in prison sentence were affirmed by the Court of Appeals in early 2022. In the meantime, the Pima County Attorney’s Office moved forward with prosecuting Yates for the Roth murder.
The trial judge approved Yates’ demand to represent himself during the December 2021 trial although advisory counsel was provided by court order. The jury also returned a quick verdict, according to court records.
Yates, who is incarcerated at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson, has had five major disciplinary infractions since mid-2020 when he was transferred into the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections. Three of the infractions involve sexual misconduct.
Pima County was sued by Roth’s mother in early 2018. Among the family members involved in the case are Roth’s father as well as Roth’s son, who was three weeks old at the time of the murder.
Court records show Roth never got to see his son, but had taken a plea deal in his low-level theft case in order to be released as soon as possible. Various parties in the civil litigation are following court-ordered deadlines to move the case toward a trial next year.
