After Remand from U.S. Supreme Court, Georgia Federal Court Vacates Brain-Damaged Prisoner’s Death Sentence

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia has overturned the death sentence imposed on Lawrence Jefferson, saying that his trial counsel had been ineffective for failing to investigate and present available mitigating evidence in his case, including evidence related to “a head injury he sustained as a child when an automobile rolled over his head.” The court also found that the state courts had denied Jefferson a “full and fair” hearing on the issue, in violation of due process, when, without notice to Jefferson’s lawyer, it invited the Assistant Attorney General to submit an order dismissing Jefferson’s petition for relief, then signed the order submitted verbatim, complete with factual misstatements and erroneous legal citations. The potential brain damage to Jefferson was so obvious that the U.S. Supreme Court noted in a 2010 opinion sending the case back for further consideration that “[t]he accident left [Jefferson’s] skull swollen and misshapen and his forehead visibly scarred.” Before trial, a psychologist had recommended that defense counsel obtain a neuropsychological evaluation of Jefferson, but no evaluation was performed. An examination conducted during Jefferson’s appeals process found significant evidence of brain damage, including an enlarged head indicative of brain swelling from the accident, asymmetrical reflexes, and discrepancies in verbal and visual-spatial test scores. A neuropsychologist concluded that these findings indicated right hemisphere and frontal lobe damage to the brain. A neurologist testified, “the most common thing with a closed head injury, traumatic injury of this sort, is problems with judgments, executive planning, and impulse control, the ability to foresee the consequences of your action in the future, as opposed to right now.” Jefferson’s jury never heard this mitigating evidence. According to the court, “The mental health evidence would have provided the jury an explanation for Petitioner’s past behavior and his testimony regarding his past behavior.” The practice of courts signing opinions and orders written by prosecutors verbatim is not uncommon. In 2016, the Supreme Court denied a petition filed by counsel for Alabama death-row prisoner Doyle Lee Hamm seeking review of his case, in which the state court adopted word-for-word an 89-page order written by the state attorney general’s office and the federal court said it was bound by the state court “findings.” That order rejected Hamm’s claim that his lawyer was ineffective, ruling that evidence the jury had never heard concerning Hamm’s childhood diagnosis of borderline mental retardation, school records reflecting Hamm’s intellectual deficits, and evidence of seizures, head injuries, and drug and alcohol abuse was “cumulative.”

(Lawrence Joseph Jefferson v. Eric Sellers, No. 1:96-CV-0989-CC (N.D. Ga. Apr. 20, 2017; Jefferson v. Upton, 560 U.S. 284 (2010).) See Representation and Mental Illness.