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Thread: James Douglas Andrews - Georgia

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    James Douglas Andrews - Georgia


    James Douglas Andrews

    Summary of Offense:


    Andrews was sentenced to death on October 16, 1992 in Muscogee County for the rape, robbery and murder on July 23, 1990 of Viola Hick, 78.

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Justice on hold: After mutilating eldery woman, James Andrews serves 19 years on death row without first appeal

    Before a Muscogee County jury sentenced him to death 19 years ago, James Douglas Andrews described in panoramic detail the day he bludgeoned an elderly woman to death with an iron skillet. After breaking into her Columbus home, the 21-year-old struck Viola A. Hicks at least 15 times, rendering the longtime Sunday school teacher’s face unrecognizable.

    “When I finally stood there and looked at Mrs. Hicks’ body, mutilated like it was, I saw what I felt like on the inside,” Andrews said at his 1992 trial, telling jurors he bent over the dying woman, kissed her on the cheek and told her he was sorry.

    Hicks’ slaying stood out as one of the most heinous on record in the Chattahoochee Valley. It horrified Columbus and drew particular ire from then-District Attorney Doug Pullen, even at a time of prolific death penalty prosecution.

    But nearly two decades after he was convicted of murder and sent to death row, Andrews, now 42, remains in the infancy of his appeals. His initial motion for a new trial has languished in Muscogee County Superior Court since 1993, and the case hasn’t been reviewed by any higher court.

    “Until that motion is ruled upon, the clock on an appeal will not start running,” said Anne S. Emanuel, a death penalty expert and professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law, adding the delay in Andrews’ case is “an unusual pace for any litigation to proceed at.”

    A review of local death row cases by the Ledger-Enquirer has found that Andrews is the oldest of three cases that remain similarly stalled at square one along a lengthy road of appeals to come. Ward A. Brockman, sentenced to death in 1994, and Johnnie A. Worsley, who made the same trip four years later, also have not filed mandatory appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court.

    “It’s certainly frustrating when it takes this long, and it makes it more difficult for everyone, including the victims’ families,” said District Attorney Julia Slater. “We’re doing what we can to resolve these cases that have been lingering for so long.”

    All three of the dormant cases have finally re-emerged, and Andrews and Brockman both are scheduled for hearings this week.

    “These things should have been pushed, but I can see with changes in administration I guess it wasn’t on anybody’s radar to push,” said Chief Superior Court Judge John D. Allen, who has sought to resolve old cases and introduced a docketing system designed to remind parties more frequently of pending cases. “It’s a disservice to the public and to the victims’ families, and it doesn’t reflect well on the system.”

    Unusual delays

    While the journey from capital conviction to the Death House is predictably long and replete with legal wrangling, the delays in these three cases are unusual even in a state prone to sluggishness after death penalty convictions, according to more than a dozen interviews with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and legal experts.

    Other death penalty cases well known to the Chattahoochee Valley have also moved slowly through the courts. But even long-running cases like that of Carlton M. Gary, the convicted “Stocking Strangler,” did not take nearly as long to clear the first appellate stage.

    Gary was convicted and sentenced to death in August 1986, and the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the sentence less than four years later.

    Troy Anthony Davis, who was executed in September for the death of Columbus native Mark MacPhail, spent more than two decades exhausting his appeals. But the Georgia Supreme Court had received and denied his first appeal less than two years after his 1991 conviction.

    “It’s been going on too long, I think,” said Catheryn Hollis, daughter of the Sunday school teacher Andrews beat to death with the skillet. “I don’t believe truly in the death penalty, but if they’re going to give you the death penalty, they should go and get it over with.”

    The reasons for the delays vary from case to case. The trial judges in the three languishing death row cases have since retired, meaning the proceedings had to be reassigned. Appellate attorneys have been appointed in the interim, and the District Attorney’s Office also has seen new faces with the changing of administrations.

    But the aging cases also highlight the potential for prolonged inactivity after capital convictions in Georgia caused by a state statute that suspends appellate deadlines while a motion for new trial is pending at the Superior Court level.

    For their part, defense attorneys said they often have no incentive to expedite the mandatory appeal.

    “The ultimate responsibility is with the trial judge,” Bill Mason, a Columbus attorney who specializes in appellate work, said in an interview. “You would think that the elected district attorney would urge the judge to move forward on a case. The defendant has no motivation to speed the process up.”

    There was little to no doubt about Andrews’ guilt, particularly after he described the slaying in the penalty phase of his trial, providing a chilling account that made some of the jurors cringe. His defense attorney at trial, Michael D. Reynolds, filed a motion for a new trial in 1993, which remains pending today.

    “I had a vested interest in just basically keeping my mouth shut,” Reynolds said. “If I pushed the motion through, all I was doing was pushing my client toward the electric chair.”

    Local attorney Mark Shelnutt prosecuted Andrews as an assistant district attorney alongside Pullen. (Reynolds, meanwhile, was assisted by Richard F. Dodelin, the defense attorney police say killed a man this February and then took his own life after a massive manhunt.)

    Shelnutt said he hounded Pullen’s successor, former District Attorney Gray Conger, about the Andrews case. He said the case file sat on the floor of Conger’s office collecting dust.

    “I periodically would ask him why (the appellate process was stalled) and say, ‘Do something,’” Shelnutt said. “It always bothered me because there was no answer.”

    Conger attributed the delays to the retirement of the trial judge, Rufe E. McCombs.

    “I wouldn’t believe (Shelnutt) on a stack of Bibles,” Conger said. “I can’t do the appeal for the defendant. I can’t make the judge do it. I can’t appoint a judge. I can only appear when there’s a hearing.”

    The latest movement in the case came in 2001, when Andrews’ defense attorneys sought unsuccessfully to recuse McCombs from the case. Andrews was not appointed his first appellate attorney until 1999 -- more than six years after his conviction -- when former Superior Court Judge Kenneth B. Followill assigned Mason to the case. (Andrews is currently represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights.)

    In a brief phone interview last week, Followill said he had no connection to the Andrews case aside from a few “house-keeping” tasks such as Mason’s appointment. Followill did, however, preside over the trials of Brockman and Worsley, the other two stalled cases.

    “I don’t know of anything I left unturned,” he said, adding that judges generally “leave it up to a moving party to request a hearing.”

    “The judge doesn’t want to take an activist role -- or appear to be an advocate of any kind -- to hustle up an execution,” Followill added.

    Several attorneys credited Allen for recognizing the inordinate delays in the Andrews and Worsley cases and scheduling hearings. “He has made a concerted effort to seek out cases that needed resolution and bring those to the docket,” Slater said of the chief judge.

    Peach State delays

    Georgia is slower than other death penalty states when it comes to death row prisoners filing direct appeals to the state Supreme Court, according to a 2007 study of appellate delays in 14 states. The analysis, conducted by two professors at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, examined cases between 1992 and 2002 and found a “bottleneck” in Georgia death penalty appeals that occurs because a motion for new trial in Superior Court suspends filing deadlines for appeals.

    Longtime capital prosecutor Susan V. Boleyn, who is special prosecutor on the Gary case in Columbus, told the professors cases often languish at that initial stage.

    “You just can’t get that transcript filed or you can’t get the judges to rule because once (the trial’s) over, nobody has incentive to get them out,” she said in the study.

    The professors pointed to an “especially egregious example” of a delay of nearly six-and-a-half years in the initial appeal in the death penalty case of William C. Sallie.

    “Andrews’ case makes Sallie’s look reckless in its haste,” Barry Latzer, one of the study’s authors, wrote in an email, adding 19 years “seems an unusual, if not an outrageous, amount of time for an initial appeal, even by Georgia standards.”

    Other death row cases from the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit have moved toward fruition at a brisker pace, underscoring the unpredictable length of a stay on death row.

    Leon A. Tollette, for instance, was sentenced to death in 1997 for killing a guard during a local robbery. He has moved from an earlier appeal to state habeas corpus proceedings, said his attorney, James Pickerstein.

    Daniel Greene, who is awaiting execution for the 1991 murder of Bernard Walker in Taylor County, has been turned down already at several levels. This year, a federal appellate court rejected his appeal.

    The average prisoner currently on death row has been there about 17 years, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.

    Mason, the appellate attorney, said each round of appeals can take months or years. The “super due process” afforded in capital cases is “meant to prevent the ultimate mistake -- executing an innocent person,” Mason said. “So many innocent people have been found on death row years and years after their conviction. It causes you to pause and wonder.”

    The Andrews case

    Pullen, the former district attorney and judge who recently resigned amid a judicial misconduct investigation, was known to look for three elements when seeking the death penalty: He generally sought capital punishment when presented with a horrible crime, a horrible defendant and overwhelming evidence.

    The Andrews case seemed to fit this description by all accounts.

    Andrews confessed to the slaying from early on and wrote detailed descriptions of the act for the police. He also had a prior conviction for child molestation.

    “From a factual standpoint, I couldn’t have gotten a worse client,” Reynolds, the original trial attorney, said in an interview. “There’s two things in our society that jurors don’t like and that’s messing with old people and messing with children -- and he did both.”

    In closing arguments, Pullen urged the jury to protect the community, saying Andrews was “guilty of the deepest, blackest, ugliest sin.”

    “Even if your moral code might accept taking something that doesn’t belong to you, your moral code stops when it comes to some things,” Pullen said, according to a trial transcript. “I suspect with most of the vilest, most evil people in our community, it stops long before what happened to Viola Hicks.”

    For his part, Andrews told jurors he was bitter about a tough childhood: “I wasn’t going to hurt her and basically -- more from being scared than anything else -- she started yelling and being angry, saying she was going to call the police and what not. And I really started abusing her,” Andrews said of the burglary.

    During deliberations, jurors sent a note to McCombs asking whether Andrews could ever get out of prison if they sentenced him to life. The trial judge responded that she couldn’t answer that question.

    “It was difficult because the defendant was so young and it was such a senseless thing that he did,” said William A. Ezekiel, 78, one of the jurors during the lengthy trial. “He seemed to be an intelligent and smart young man. It was a waste of her old life and a waste of his young life.”

    Three jurors interviewed this month offered mixed reactions upon learning of Andrews’ appellate status.

    Carolyn C. West, 73, of Columbus said she assumed that an appeal would happen “right away.” She said she was surprised at the delay, but then reconsidered during a phone interview: “Not when you read in the paper about all of these cases that have taken so long. It’s not the first time it’s happened.”

    Columbus businessman Eddie Pritchett, 55, said he had nightmares about the trial due to his service on the jury. He said the jurors were closely guarded during the trial due to a death threat. He was escorted home in a patrol car after the trial ended.

    “I’ve seen some terrible things, but that was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” Pritchett said. “I’m not a very violent guy, but I could push the button that puts the stuff in his veins. He has no redeeming value whatsoever.”

    The pace of Andrews’ appeals shows the state has a “broken system,” Pritchett added.

    “It does frustrate me that they took three weeks of my life to convict this guy and there’s never been an appeal filed, and it’s going to take another 20 years for him to meet his maker,” said Pritchett, who missed seeing the Atlanta Braves play the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1992 World Series because of the trial. “He’ll die of old age. It’s like an unintentional life sentence.”

    But if Hicks had it her way, prosecutors never would have sought the death penalty in the first place, her daughter said.

    “She wouldn’t have pushed for no death penalty,” Hollis, who attended the trial, said in a phone interview from her Los Angeles home. “She was a true Christian.”

    Read more: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2011/...#ixzz1dZWsZkSq

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    Senior Member Member GASMANDIRTY's Avatar
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    Georgia death row inmate james andrews sentence was commuted to life without parole !!!!!!!!!!! The state of georgia think he's to sick to be executed !!!!!!!!!!!!!

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Below is a link from the Georgia Department of Corrections showing that Andrews is now serving a life-without-parole sentence.

    http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/GDC/Offe...Redirector.jsp

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