Oklahoma teen sentenced to life in prison for killing Australian

By Heide Brandes

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - An Oklahoma teen was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for fatally shooting an Australian student baseball player who was out on a jog.

Chancey Luna, 18, was convicted of the August 2013 drive-by killing of Christopher Lane, then a 22-year-old student at East Central University as he was jogging along a residential road in Duncan, about 80 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.

Prosecutors said Luna and two other teenagers in a car with him shot Lane because they were bored.

Attorneys for Luna said he was 16 at the time of the crime and should have had his case heard by a juvenile court. Luna was tried as an adult.

One co-defendant in the case, James Edwards Jr., struck a deal with the prosecution to testify against Luna, having his murder charge dropped to an accessory-after-the-fact count.

During a preliminary hearing last year, Edwards testified that another teenager, Michael Jones, was driving and that Luna fired the gun from the back seat.

Jones pleaded guilty in March to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison, court officials said.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Peter Cooney)