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Thread: Doyle Lee Hamm - Alabama

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    Doyle Lee Hamm - Alabama




    Summary of Offense:

    Hamm was convicted and sentenced to death on December 1, 1987 for killing Patrick Cunningham during a robbery on January 24, 1987.

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    On May 16, 2006, Hamm filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/ala...v00945/112355/

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    On August 15, 2013, Hamm was denied a Certificate of Appealabilty in Federal District Court.

    http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal...0945/112355/30

    On September 24, 2013, Hamm filed an appeal in the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir...ca11/13-14376/

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    On August 3, 2015, the Eleventh Circuit DENIED Hamm's appeal.

    The panel was made up of Judges Tjoflat (Ford), Jordan (Obama) and Rosenbaum (Obama).

    http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opini.../201314376.pdf

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    On October 26, 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit DENIED Hamm's petition for en banc rehearing.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/search.a...es/15-8753.htm

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    The Death Penalty Case Where Prosecutors Wrote the Judge’s ‘Opinion’

    Is that fair? The U.S. Supreme Court could soon decide.

    By Andrew Cohen
    The Marshall Project

    When judges make a decision—especially in a death penalty case—we’d like to think they weigh all sides, consider the law and come to a measured, independent conclusion. Not so in Alabama, where a judge’s shortcut in the case of Doyle Lee Hamm has shown how often the state makes a mockery of the appeals process.

    The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up the case of Hamm, an intellectually disabled and possibly brain-damaged man who was sentenced to death in 1987 for killing a motel clerk during a robbery. Doyle went to his fate after a rushed trial marked by an anemic defense and constitutionally murky decisions by prosecutors and the judge. That’s sadly common in Alabama.

    What happened next also is common in Alabama—but pretty much nowhere else.

    Twelve years after Hamm was sentenced to death, an Alabama judge rejected an attempt by his new attorneys to win another sentencing hearing for their client. The lawyers wanted to present facts from Hamm’s grim life that might have convinced a jury not to impose death—so-called mitigation evidence—that Hamm’s first lawyer failed to unearth during his trial. That, too, happens all the time.

    But in turning down the appeal, the judge exposed the entire process as a sham. He signed an 89-page order written entirely by the Alabama Attorney General’s Office—and did it within one business day of receiving it. He didn’t even take the time to cross off the word “Proposed” in the title, “Proposed Memorandum Opinion.” Hamm’s attorneys allege the judge never read the opinion before signing it, and no state attorney has ever refuted that.

    Many judges across the country routinely sign perfunctory orders drafted by lawyers, usually one- or two-page documents. But only in Texas and Alabama, evidently, is this done with substantive opinions on which appellate judges later rely.

    In the Hamm case, the “opinion” is the lynchpin of Alabama’s decades-long defense of its conviction and death sentence. It has been cited as gospel over and over again since 1999 by state and federal judges to justify their refusal to give Hamm a new sentencing hearing. Over and over again, the argument justifying this practice has been the same: it doesn’t really matter who wrote the opinion or even whether the judge who signed it ever read it because Hamm hasn’t proven that the contents of the order were wrong.

    No one disputes Hamm’s culpability in the murder of Patrick Cunningham. Two accomplices, who at first claimed they had been kidnapped by Hamm, agreed to testify against him. But prosecutors probably didn’t need them. Hamm confessed after a lengthy interrogation. The statement was read for the jury, which took just 50 minutes to come back with a guilty verdict.

    It was the next phase of Hamm’s trial—the sentencing phase—that raises the questions now on appeal to the Supreme Court.

    Hamm’s trial attorney did virtually nothing to try to spare his client’s life and called only two witnesses in his 19-minute defense: Hamm’s sister and a bailiff. When prosecutors improperly introduced evidence of Hamm’s prior convictions in Tennessee—convictions that may have been based on flawed procedures—Hamm’s attorney did nothing to correct the error. It took the jury just 45 minutes to come back and recommend a death sentence.

    Jurors were never told that Hamm had been diagnosed as borderline mentally retarded as early as 1969, nearly two decades before the crime. They were not told about a school record that repeatedly cited his intellectual deficits. Nor were jurors given any expert evidence about Hamm’s lengthy history of seizures, head injuries and drug and alcohol abuse. The fuller portrait of Hamm’s life was that of a barely literate, brain-damaged man with little impulse control, someone who might have been perceived as having diminished criminal responsibility.

    Alabama prosecutors maintain that information would have made no difference in his sentencing. The 1999 opinion naturally took a took a dim view of the relevance and timeliness of the evidence presented by Hamm’s new defense attorneys. The opinion states the evidence wasn’t “new” but “cumulative”—essentially, repetitive—a legal standard that makes a difference in winning a new hearing. How evidence that was never introduced at trial could be considered “cumulative” 12 years later was a question left unanswered.

    No judge evaluating this case has ever declared the “Proposed Memorandum Opinion” invalid. The closest anyone came was last year, during oral arguments before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, when an incredulous Judge Adalberto Jordan questioned Alabama attorneys about the appearance of partiality created by the “opinion.” Wouldn’t you be hollering if the judge had rubber-stamped an 89-page ruling drafted by defense attorneys, the judge asked state lawyers? And isn’t there something fishy about such a detailed opinion being signed on a Monday after being submitted on the previous Friday?

    The state had no good answer to those questions, but it didn’t matter. Jordan, like all the judges before him, shrugged and joined two other appellate judges in denying relief to Hamm.

    Both in and out of court, Alabama has defended both Hamm’s sentencing hearing and the ghostwriting episode. The “Proposed Memorandum Opinion” is sound no matter who wrote it, state lawyers argue, and there is no reason to think it unreasonable that the judge who signed it did so without considering its contents.

    It would be one thing if the ghostwriting scenario that took place in the Hamm case was a one-off event. It is not. In support of Hamm, a group of former Alabama judges and past state bar presidents told the justices in Washington that it is routine practice in Alabama for prosecutors to write proposed orders for judges in capital cases. In 2003, a study found that in 17 of 20 recent capital cases the judge had denied relief in orders written entirely by prosecutors.

    Sure, the criminal justice system would move more quickly if prosecutors ghostwrote appellate decisions in capital cases. No defendant ever would win an appeal. No conviction or sentence would ever be adjudged unfair or unjust. Judges could knock off early. But that’s not how our system works, at least not beyond the borders of Alabama. Hamm may be a convicted murderer. But that doesn’t mean the state can subvert his rights in such a blatant fashion.

    This shouldn’t be a tough call for the Supreme Court. The case presents a straightforward opportunity to send a clear message to lower court judges: whatever else due process means, whatever else federal habeas corpus rules mean, they require a judge to at least pretend to carefully consider the evidence before rendering judgment in a capital case. If the Supreme Court does this and no more in the Hamm case, it will be furthering the interests of justice.

    https://www.themarshallproject.org/2...ion#.uLPKLtI9G

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    THE LONG DEFENSE OF THE ALABAMA DEATH-ROW PRISONER DOYLE LEE HAMM

    On death row at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, in Bessemer, Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm is known as “Pops.” He is fifty-nine years old and has been at Donaldson since 1987, when a jury found him guilty of fatally shooting a motel clerk during a robbery. The fact that Hamm has managed to elude execution for nearly three decades can be explained, in large part, by the tenacity of a single person: his attorney, Bernard E. Harcourt. The two met in 1990, soon after Harcourt began working for the lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who at the time had just started an organization in Alabama to defend condemned prisoners. Hamm was one of Harcourt’s first clients.

    The two men came from opposite worlds. Harcourt was raised on Park Avenue, went to Princeton, and had recently graduated from Harvard Law School; his father was a partner in a law firm. Hamm grew up in northwest Alabama, the tenth of twelve children; his father worked as a carpenter and cotton picker, made his own moonshine, drank every day, beat his children with a switch, and was a frequent resident of the county jail (on charges of public drunkenness). Hamm’s sister later described their childhood home as “constant hell all the time.” She also recalled their father telling the children, “If you don’t go out and steal, then you’re not a Hamm.”

    Growing up, Hamm flunked first grade, drank beer and whiskey mixed together, graduated to sniffing glue several times a day, quit school in the ninth grade, ingested Valium and Percocet and quaaludes, watched his six older brothers all go to jail, and eventually acquired his own extensive rap sheet, including arrests for burglary, assault, and grand larceny. He married and had one daughter. (The marriage lasted six months; his wife cited “habitual drunkenness” as one of the grounds for divorce.) In January of 1987, Hamm went on a crime spree that included a shooting in Mississippi and ended when he and two accomplices were arrested following the murder of a motel clerk in Alabama. About three hundred and fifty dollars were missing from the register and the clerk was found on the floor, shot once in the temple. Hamm confessed to the murder, and, at thirty years old, he was condemned to death by way of Alabama’s electric chair, which was painted yellow and known by the nickname Yellow Mama.

    Ever since meeting Hamm, Harcourt has been trying to save him from this fate. In the early nineteen-nineties, he hired an investigator named Gaye Nease to research Hamm’s past and search for “mitigating evidence” that might persuade a judge to spare his life. With Nease’s help, Harcourt collected hundreds of pages of documents, including Hamm’s parents’ original marriage certificate, from 1938; his father’s honorable-discharge papers from the Army, from 1946; and medical records from Doyle’s birth, in 1957. Harcourt also obtained elementary-school report cards, test scores showing Hamm reading at a first-grade level in fifth grade, his mother’s food-stamp paperwork, his brothers’ rap sheets, divorce papers filed by his brothers’ wives, Hamm’s own divorce papers, and photos of his parents and siblings and ancestors.

    Through the decades, wherever Harcourt went—to Harvard to get a doctorate in political science, to the University of Arizona to teach, to the University of Chicago for a tenure job—Hamm’s case went with him. This did not mean simply dropping one more box into the back of a U-Haul; Harcourt had accumulated some twenty thousand pages, between legal documents and mitigating evidence—enough to fill eleven bankers boxes. Over the years, he kept in touch with Hamm by phone and travelled back to Alabama to work on the case.

    Harcourt’s hope was not to prove Hamm’s innocence but to persuade a judge to throw out his death sentence and instead give him life in prison without parole. He fought on Hamm’s behalf in state court until 1998, when Harcourt asked for a hearing to be postponed and a judge assigned Hamm another attorney. The new lawyer lost the hearing. Harcourt still considered himself Hamm’s attorney, however, and immediately filed an appeal on his behalf. This request was denied in 2002. Harcourt appealed the decision to the Alabama Supreme Court but lost again. He continued his battle in federal district court, filing a habeas petition in 2006 to try to get Hamm a new trial. That court denied Hamm’s request in 2013.

    None of these outcomes surprised Harcourt, but he kept at it, appealing the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where he was turned down once again. About six months ago, Harcourt exercised his last option: filing a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. On September 26th, the Court is set to consider whether to hear Hamm’s case. The stakes could not be higher: if the Supreme Court declines to accept Hamm’s case, Harcourt believes that the state of Alabama will finally set Hamm’s execution date.

    Today, the archive of Doyle Lee Hamm’s life resides in Harcourt’s sixth-floor office at Columbia Law School, where he is now a professor. Stacks of manila folders fill an entire file drawer, spread across a desk, and occupy the tops of two lateral file cabinets. News articles about Hamm’s crime fill one folder, and relay a horrific story, but there is another story, too, hidden inside other folders—it comes out through interviews with a sibling and a neighbor and tells how Hamm’s father came home from the Second World War so traumatized that he began drinking all the time. There is a report by a psychologist describing Hamm as a “severe polydrug abuser for much of his life,” who had a “history of seizures” and “a significant history of head injuries,” and who shows “neuropsychological impairment” and probable “brain damage.” There is also a stack of documents, rising more than a foot high, about an earlier arrest, in Tennessee. In 1977, at age twenty, Doyle, drunk and high, got into a fight in a bar parking lot. Afterward, the police arrested him for allegedly robbing the other man. Though he insisted that he had not robbed anyone, his court-appointed attorney coached him on how to enter a guilty plea, and he was given a prison sentence of five years.

    Fourteen years later, when Harcourt re-investigated this conviction, the “victim” admitted that there had been no robbery, and Hamm’s attorney at the time, a man named William Travis Gobble, admitted that he had never investigated the allegations. “I was just too busy and overworked to give this case the time and attention it needed,” he said in an affidavit. “My practice at the time was not to educate my appointed clients about the judicial system. I assumed that they knew what a criminal trial was and what happened at trial. My concern was to make sure that my client gave the right answers at the plea hearing to get the deal agreed upon.” Years later, at the penalty-phase hearing following Hamm’s trial for capital murder, prosecutors brought up this earlier conviction to try to persuade jurors that they should send Hamm to the electric chair.

    Another disturbing aspect of Hamm’s death-penalty case recently received some media attention. In 1999, when a state judge ruled against Hamm, he issued an eighty-nine-page opinion on the case. The trouble was that the opinion appeared to have been written by the office of the Alabama Attorney General. (The judge’s opinion was identical to a document submitted to the court one business day earlier by the Attorney General’s office. They even shared a title: “Proposed Memorandum Opinion”—apparently, the judge had not even removed the word “Proposed” before signing it.) “It bothers the heck out of me,” a judge on the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals said in court when he and his colleagues considered the case. “I don’t believe for a second that that judge went through 89 pages in a day and then filed that as his own, as if he had gone through everything—went through his notes, the transcript, the exhibit[s], and the like,” he said. “It just can’t be done!”

    The “proposed memorandum opinion”—and the legality of a federal court later deciding to defer to it—is at the center of Harcourt’s petition to the Supreme Court. “Deferring to the proposed order is basically deferring to the state’s interpretation of the evidence,” Harcourt says. In this case, the state’s attorney general “was serving as prosecutor and judge.” (In its response to Hamm’s petition, the office of the Alabama Attorney General admitted that the “judge did not take the word ‘Proposed’ out of the order,” but argued that Hamm had failed to prove that the “findings of fact or conclusions of law” in the proposed opinion were “erroneous.”)

    Harcourt has represented Hamm pro bono since leaving Alabama in 1994. “There have been times I’ve just felt overwhelmed by my other responsibilities,” he says. “I write books—I don’t litigate death-penalty cases for a living.” Harcourt occasionally considered handing over Hamm’s case to another lawyer but he never did. “I gave him my word early on, when we first met,” he said. “I told him I’d stick with him.” For twenty-six years, they’ve kept in regular contact, on the phone and by mail, and now that they are preparing to find out if the Supreme Court might hear his case, they speak more often.

    Two or three times a week, Harcourt gets a call from Hamm, from death row in Donaldson prison. “Hey, how you doing?” Harcourt greeted him one afternoon this past June. “You doing O.K.?”

    “Yeah, doing good,” Hamm said.

    When they speak on the phone, Hamm always sounds the same—low-key, uncomplaining. Harcourt mentioned a riot that had taken place at another prison in Alabama and asked Hamm if he had heard about it. “I saw it on TV,” Hamm said, but insisted that all was calm where he was confined. “Everything is pretty good.” The two men talked about what had been been on the menu lately, whether Hamm went outside that morning, which man on death row was most recently executed.

    These days, Hamm has more contact with Harcourt than with any of his relatives; the last time he saw a family member, he recalls, was when his younger sister came to see him in 1997. Seven of his nine siblings are now dead. (One brother hanged himself, two brothers had heart attacks, another died in a car wreck.) Aside from his attorney, the person Hamm talks to most often is the father of his friend Keith Johnson, who was on death row with him for fifteen years. Whenever Johnson’s father is feeling well enough, he comes back to the prison to visit Hamm. Johnson was executed in 2002 for his role in the fatal shooting of a jewelry dealer, even though he did not fire the shot that killed the victim.

    Hamm estimates that he’s lost about twenty-six friends in his nearly three decades on death row. Some died of natural causes, but many were executed; fifty-four people have been put to death in Alabama in those years. Yellow Mama, Alabama’s electric chair, is now in storage (Johnson was the first Alabama inmate to die by lethal injection). Hamm now has two granddaughters, ages fourteen and four, and gray in his hair. The other inmates refer to him and three others as the O.M.G., which stands for the Old-Man Gang. He continues to pass his days in much the same way he has for years—playing dominoes, reading the Bible, and walking laps inside the prison.

    “He did a good job, regardless of what happens,” Hamm said of Harcourt. “If I hadn’t had Bernard, I believe I would have been executed. Yep, I do believe that.” He pauses. “I believe,” he says, “I would’ve been executed ten years ago.” The question of what will happen next—whether Hamm will be allowed to die of natural causes in prison, or will be tied down to a table one day and injected with deadly doses of drugs—lingers on the edge of every conversation he has with his attorney. One afternoon in late August, their phone call ended with Harcourt saying, “Take care, Doyle. Talk to you soon.” The hope of both men is that their calls will always end this way, that there will be never be a need to say good-bye.

    http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...doyle-lee-hamm
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Hamm’s petition for certiorari.

    Appeals exhausted. Ruling could result in execution date.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

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    SCOTUS rejects Alabama Death Row inmate's appeal for 1987 Cullman motel clerk slaying

    The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it won't review the appeal of Alabama Death Row inmate Doyle Hamm, who was convicted in the 1987 slaying of a motel clerk during a robbery.

    Hamm was sentenced to death for his conviction in the shooting death of Patrick Cunningham during the robbery on Jan. 24, 1987.

    After his trial, the jury recommended on September 28, 1987, by a vote of 11 to 1, that Hamm be sentenced to death. The judge followed the recommendation and imposed the death penalty.

    The New Yorker magazine recently published a story on Hamm's case and the inmate's lawyer of nearly three decades, Bernard Harcourt, who is now a professor at Columbia Law School in New York.

    Efforts to reach Harcourt after Monday's ruling by SCOTUS were unsuccessful.

    Harcourt found in the early 1990s that a 1977 robbery from Tennessee – which Hamm denied committing - was used to convince jurors to sentence Hamm to the death penalty, The New Yorker reported. The victim in that Tennessee crime said later there was no robbery, the magazine reported.

    In another twist, when a state judge ruled against Hamm in an 89-page opinion, the opinion appeared to have been written by the Alabama Attorney General's Office, the magazine stated. The issue had made the news around that time.

    "The judge's opinion was identical to a document submitted to the court one business day earlier by the Attorney General's office. They even shared a title: "Proposed Memorandum Opinion"—apparently, the judge had not even removed the word "Proposed" before signing it," The New Yorker story stated.

    An earlier federal appellate court opinion laid out the following facts of the crime and case:

    At approximately 10:30 p.m., Kathy Flanagan stopped at the motel (the Anderson Motel in Cullman) to rent a room for the night. While Flanagan was registering, a small-framed white male entered the motel to ask about a room.

    Cunningham informed the male that he needed a reservation, and the male left. Moments later, the first male returned accompanied by a second male wearing blue jeans and a faded green army jacket. Cunningham told Flanagan that 'it 'looks like there is going to be trouble' and apparently pointed Flanagan in the direction of a room, but Flanagan returned to her car," according to the court opinion. From her car, Flanagan saw the individual in the green jacket point a revolver at the registration desk but could not see behind the desk; she also saw the first male standing by the door and noticed a banged-up 1970s model car in the parking lot, with its engine running, and possibly a third individual inside. Flanagan left the scene, drove to a nearby telephone, and called police to report a possible robbery.

    Upon arriving at the motel, police discovered Cunningham's body on the floor behind the front desk. Cunningham had been killed by a single shot to the head from a .38-caliber pistol. The evidence further established that he had been shot in the temple from a distance of approximately 18 inches while he was lying on the floor.

    Cunningham's wallet, containing approximately $60 was missing, as was approximately $350 from the motel's cash drawer.

    A Cullman police officer learned that two men matching the descriptions given by Flanagan were also wanted for a robbery-murder that had taken place in Mississippi that same day. A nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver had been taken during that robbery."

    On January 25, the same officer spoke with Douglas Roden, who had been stopped while driving a car matching the description given by Flanagan. Roden claimed that he and his sister-in-law, Regina Roden, had been kidnapped by Hamm and two others. Roden further stated that he and Regina had been held captive in a trailer home during the time of the motel robbery while Hamm and another individual left with the car. In addition, Roden asserted that he and Regina had escaped the trailer that morning and had taken the car. Roden directed police to the trailer. At some point, the police learned that the trailer was owned by Hamm's nephew.

    Later that day, a search warrant was obtained for the trailer and a fugitive-from-justice warrant was obtained for Hamm for a robbery in Mississippi. Id. During the search of the trailer, authorities discovered a nickel-plated .38-caliber pistol, a green army jacket, and several rounds of .38-caliber ammunition, including some in the pocket of the jacket.

    Hamm was arrested and booked on the fugitive warrant. He initially denied any involvement in the murder and robbery at the Anderson's Motel, and Flanagan failed to identify Hamm in a lineup. Nevertheless, Hamm was placed under arrest for the motel robbery. Id. The next day, Hamm gave a statement to the police that was recorded, in which he admitted his initial statements were false and he confessed to the robbery and murder of Cunningham.

    Subsequently, it was discovered that the Rodens had lied in their initial statements. They had not been kidnapped and, in fact, Douglas and Regina were the two individuals present with Hamm at the Anderson's Motel during the robbery and murder; Douglas was the first male individual to enter the motel. The Rodens entered into agreements with the state where, in exchange for testimony against Hamm, they would receive lesser charges. Douglas agreed to plead guilty to murder and received a life sentence; Regina pled guilty to robbery and hindering prosecution."


    http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/in...a_death_r.html
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    This is more like it.

    Alabama AG's office seeking three more executions

    Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Wednesday that the state is seeking to conduct more executions this year.

    Marshall visited Mobile on Wednesday to speak at a class educating local law enforcement officers on how to handle digital evidence in violent crime cases, and took questions from media afterward. Asked if his office planned to pursue additional executions, Marshall said "we've made an additional request" to the Alabama Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the state's motions to set execution dates for three death row inmates. According to information provided by Marshall's office, the three cases in question are:

    Torrey Twane McNabb - McNabb has spent 18 years on death row, since being convicted of fatally shooting Montgomery Police Officer Anderson Gordon in September 1997. McNabb was convicted on two capital murder counts, one for killing Gordon while he was on duty, one for killing him as Gordon sat in his patrol car. McNabb also was found guilty of two additional counts of attempted murder. The jury voted 10-2 in favor of the death penalty on the two capital murder counts.

    Jeffrey Borden -- Borden has been on death row for 22 years after being convicted of the 1993 murders of Cheryl Borden and Roland Harris. The murders took place at a family gathering in Gardendale on Christmas Eve; according to a summary presented at trial, Borden had traveled from Huntsville to Gardendale to deliver his three children by Cheryl Borden, his legally separate wife. After Cheryl Borden arrived on the scene, Jeffrey Borden shot her in the back of her head outside the house in the presence of the children. Borden then shot Roland Harris, his wife's father, in the back as Harris tried to run into the house. The jury recommended death on a 10-2 vote.

    Doyle Lee Hamm - Hamm has spent 29 years on death row since being convicted of the 1987 murder of Patrick Cunningham. Cunningham, an employee of Anderson's Motel in Cullman, killed during a robbery that apparently netted about $410. In the course of the investigation, Hamm confessed to the murder; in exchange for being allowed to plead guilty to lesser offense, two accomplices testified against him.

    While some states have had trouble securing adequate supplies of the drugs used in lethal-injection protocols, Marshall indicated that will not be an impediment if the court sets execution dates for Hamm, Borden and McNabb. "Yes, we have the means," he said, when asked if the state would be able to follow through.

    Though Marshall did not bring up the topic of the death penalty in his address to the group of officers assembled for Wednesday's event, Mobile County District Atttorney Ashley Rich did. Rich told officers she couldn't stay at the event because she had to be in court later Wednesday in a capital murder case that was being retried.

    "I tried it about 10 years ago," Rich said of the 2008 conviction of Garrett Dotch, accused of killing his ex-girlfriend in 2006. "We got the death penalty. And we have this pesky little group called the Equal Justice Initiative that likes to hire fancy lawyers in New York pro bono and spend millions of dollars trying to repeal the death penalty in the state of Alabama.

    "Well, I'm kind of fond of the death penalty," said Rich. "I think we need the death penalty in the state of Alabama, so we're continuing to fight the Equal Justice Initiative and big law firms who have millions of dollars and want to come down here and reverse all of our death penalty cases."

    In a 2015 Public Service Activities report by international law firm Covington and Burling, the firm said it was representing Dotch in a retrial. "The firm previously was successful during the state habeas process in obtaining full relief from his capital sentence, for both the guilt and penalty phases," it said. "The firm also previously represented Mr. Dotch in his direct appeals. Mr. Dotch was referred to Covington by the Equal Justice Initiative."

    In a 2016 report after Dotch's conviction was vacated, Covington said that it had "petitioned the trial court for post-conviction relief on multiple grounds. For one thing, a juror had failed to disclose in voir dire that his wife had been murdered a few years earlier in circumstances very similar to the crime of which Mr. Dotch was accused. For another, trial counsel performed virtually no investigation into Mr. Dotch's life, family, and background, and, as a result, failed to discover powerful mitigating evidence about horrific neglect and abuse suffered by Mr. Dotch throughout his life." Covington said the decision to vacate the conviction was "extremely rare in Alabama, and it will be important precedent for the state's death-penalty bar."

    Rich said Wednesday that Marshall was helpful in giving her office and local law enforcement "the resources that we needed to re-try this capital murder and death penalty case and get the death penalty again. And we're going to. We're going to try this case again."

    http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/201...eking_thr.html
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

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