North Dakota's last execution was in 1905, and the last person sentenced to death was spared in 1915. The state no longer has the death penalty, but it is allowed in federal cases.

"Hopefully, this case will spur a debate in the state of North Dakota about the death penalty, and the problems and difficulties that it raises," said defense attorney Robert Hoy.

Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said the slayings of Sjodin, 22, of Pequot Lakes, Minn., a University of North Dakota student, and Mindy Morgenstern, 22, of New Salem, a Valley City State University student, may revive the issue in the Legislature.

Morgenstern was found dead in her apartment last week, and authorities said her throat was slashed. Moe Maurice Gibbs, 34, a Barnes County jailer who lived in her apartment building, has been charged with murder.

Sjodin disappeared from a Grand Forks shopping mall parking lot in 2003. Her body was found nearly five months later in a Minnesota ravine, and authorities said she had been beaten, raped and stabbed.

North Dakota lawmakers have not debated a death penalty bill since 1995, when the Senate defeated the idea. Stenehjem was a senator at the time, and he led the opposition to the measure on the Senate floor.

"You have to think about what kind of a reaction the state of North Dakota needs to offer," Stenehjem said Friday. "I think it's early to say that the Legislature might take a different approach than it has, but sometimes you have to look and say, 'Maybe things are changing.'"

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