Juror removal delays death penalty decision in Allison Feldman murder case

The guilty verdict in the Allison Feldman murder case still stands, but the final question in the courtroom was blown back to the start after a juror was removed from the penalty phase. That reset left Ian Mitcham facing the same two outcomes, death or life in prison, but forced the Maricopa County jury to begin its sentencing work all over again.

Mitcham was found guilty on April 9, 2026, of first-degree murder, sexual assault and burglary in Feldman’s 2015 killing. The case had already carried unusual weight in Arizona because it was the first time familial DNA was used in the state to help identify a suspect. Feldman was 31 when she was killed in Scottsdale, and court coverage placed her death inside her home near Loop 101 and Pima Road.

The penalty phase had reached closing arguments when the juror problem surfaced. Judge Sunito Cairo removed the juror after the person asked someone outside the jury about life on death row, a clear breach of the rules that govern capital deliberations. Cairo denied the defense request for a mistrial, then brought in an alternate and ordered the panel to start over, stretching out a proceeding that was supposed to move the case toward a final sentence.

That delay matters because the penalty phase is the last step between a guilty verdict and punishment in a capital case. Feldman’s family has waited more than a decade for the courtroom to reach this point, and the restart means that wait continues. ABC15 noted that February 17, 2026 marked eleven years since her family last heard from her.

The investigation that got Mitcham here was built on a DNA trail that began at the crime scene and ended with him. Police linked familial DNA from Feldman’s home to Mitcham’s incarcerated brother, then tied it to Mitcham himself after matching it with a blood sample collected during a January 2015 DUI arrest. Mitcham was arrested in April 2018 after that chain of evidence came together in Phoenix.

That DNA fight went all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled on December 17, 2024, that the warrantless collection violated Mitcham’s Fourth Amendment rights but that the evidence could still come in under the inevitable-discovery exception. Court documents also described Feldman’s death as asphyxiation with blunt force trauma, and investigators said her body was found nude and smelled of bleach, details that have made this one of Arizona’s most grimly watched murder cases.

For now, the verdict is locked in and the sentencing question is not. Mitcham still faces the same life-or-death choice before the jury, only now the panel has to hear it again from the top.