Steven Sandison had nothing left to lose.
At 51, he was serving life without parole for a homicide committed in October 1991 in Wayne County, Michigan. Even so, on October 29, he shared a cell at Saginaw Correctional Facility with Theodore Dyer, a 67-year-old man from Grand Haven who was serving 25 to 50 years for sexually abusing a minor.
According to Sandison’s own confession, the problem wasn’t just what Dyer had done. It was that he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Sandison said he beat him and then wrapped a cable around his neck and strangled him to death.
On February 23, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Judge Fred Borchard of the Saginaw County Circuit Court sentenced him to another life sentence, this time with the possibility of parole. In practice, a man who will never leave prison for the first crime received a second sentence for killing someone in the same cell where he was supposed to serve the first.
