Alabama prosecutors have agreed that Renard Marcel Daniel (pictured) should be resentenced to life without parole, after the state’s mental health expert administered psychological tests to Daniel that showed the intellectually disabled man had an IQ of 48. Earlier in January, Daniel’s lawyers — with the consent of the Alabama Attorney General’s office — filed a motion in federal district court jointly asking the court to vacate Daniel’s death sentence and return his case to state court for him to be resentenced. Daniel, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003, was represented at trial by lawyers who never spoke with him until three days before his trial. He argued in his state and federal appeals that his death sentence should be overturned because his lawyers had failed to investigate and present extensive evidence of his intellectual disability and horrifically traumatic childhood. The investigation by Daniel’s appeal lawyers discovered that, when Daniel was only three years old, his mother killed his father with a shotgun while Daniel was in the home. They learned that before Daniel was even a teenager, his stepfather began sexually assaulting him and forced him to engage in sex acts on his siblings. His stepfather, they found, also regularly beat Daniel, one time so severely that he had to be hospitalized with a ruptured kidney. School records that trial counsel failed to obtain also showed that Daniel was placed in special education classes and suffered from severely deficient intellectual functioning from a young age, and was reading at only a second-grade level when he was thirteen. Yet despite being presented a truncated version of Daniel’s traumatic childhood through brief testimony by his mother at trial, two jurors recommended that Daniel be sentenced to life. But Alabama law permitted the trial judge to impose a death sentence without a unanimous jury vote, and the court sentenced him to death. Alabama’s state courts and the Alabama federal district court rejected Daniel’s appeals without an evidentiary hearing. However, in May 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, calling Daniel’s childhood “nightmarish by any standard,” ruled that the state courts had unreasonably denied his claims. It reversed the district court’s decision dismissing Daniel’s habeas petition and directed the court to conduct an evidentiary hearing on Daniel’s penalty-stage ineffectiveness claim. In preparation for that hearing, the State’s expert measured Daniel’s IQ at 48, more than 20 IQ points below the accepted stardard for diagnosing intellectual disability. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia that subjecting people with intellectual disability to the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, and state prosecutors agreed that Daniel should be resentenced to life.
(Andrew Cohen, Justice Poker, The Marshall Project, January 29, 2018; When Capital Punishment Is a Game of Chance [audio story], The Takeaway, January 30, 2018; Kelsey Stein, Alabama inmate convicted in double murder to get new hearing on death sentence, Al.com, May 17, 2016.) Read the Eleventh Circuit Opinion. See Intellectual Disability.
