A London judge on Friday rejected a U.S. mother's challenge to her extradition to face murder charges in Colorado in the deaths of two of her young children. The ruling by Judge John Zani at Westminster Magistrates’ Court clears the way for the British government to order Kimberlee Singler’s return to America.
Singler, 36, is accused of two counts of first-degree murder in the December 2023 shooting and stabbings of her 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, and one count of attempted murder in the slashing of her 11-year-old daughter with a knife. She also faces three counts of child abuse and one count of assault.
Singler’s attorney had argued that sending her back to the U.S. would violate European human rights law, in part, because she faces a sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted in Colorado of first-degree murder. Such a sentence would be inhumane because it offers no prospect for release even if she is rehabilitated, attorney Edward Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald said that despite an option for a Colorado governor to commute her sentence at some point, it would be “political suicide” to do so. Experts for the defense had originally said that a life sentence had never been commuted in Colorado. But prosecutors later found that Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2018 commuted life sentences of five men convicted of murder.
The defense countered that three of those sentences were not life without parole and two were for men who committed their crime between the ages of 18 and 21, which is sometimes considered a mitigating factor at sentencing because of the offender's relative youth.
