The life of Terry Ball (pictured) “is worth remembering,” says his appeal lawyer, Elizabeth Hambourger. She says Ball’s life, which ended October 18 when he died of natural causes on North Carolina’s death row, “hold[s] keys to understanding the origins of crime and our shared humanity with people labeled the worst of the worst.” His “story of childhood trauma and brain damage” is characteristic of the backgrounds of many on death row, Hambourger says, but “was barely told at trial.” Ball was convicted and sentenced to death for the cocaine-induced murder of his pastor’s wife and attempted murder of his pastor in 1993, which occurred during a relapse of Ball’s cocaine addition. His road to death row began when he was hit by a car at age 10, suffering injuries that kept him hospitalized for eight weeks. The head trauma changed his personality, but the severity of his brain damage was not detected at the time. He and a girlfriend ran away from home when he was 13, during which time he was abducted by a serial rapist, Jerry Wood, and repeatedly raped, kept high on drugs, and forced to steal, until he was able to escape nearly a month later. Rather than receiving mental-health services as a victim of sexual assault, Ball was adjudicated delinquent for running away and was incarcerated in a juvenile detention center, where a state psychiatrist questioned his sexual identity, writing that his month-long “association” with his rapist “raised the question of possible homosexuality.” Wood, who was never prosecuted for raping and abducting Ball, was later convicted of raping two other children and sentenced to 45 years in jail. Ball then turned to drugs as self-medication for his trauma. He later enlisted in, but was swiftly discharged from, the Navy and subsequently committed several violent drug-motivated robberies and was jailed for nearly killing two people. After his release from prison, he checked himself in to three treatment centers over the course of three years, all in an unsuccessful effort to overcome his addiction to crack cocaine. Hambourger says that Ball’s story is a reminder that “[t]his is who we sentence to death: the most damaged, the most abused; traumatized children who grow into adults without learning how to cope with their fear and anger.” In North Carolina, death sentences have fallen from an average of 28 per year in the five years spanning 1992-1996 to an average of one per year between 2012-2016. Hambourger believes that, had Ball’s trial been held today, “this mitigating evidence would have been thoroughly presented and likely would have persuaded a jury to sentence him to life without parole instead of death.”

(E. Hambourger, “A life condemned: Remembering my client who died on death row,” North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, November 14, 2017; J. Boyd, “Death row inmate convicted in 1994 Beaufort Co. murder dies,” WCTI News, New Bern, North Carolina, October 18, 2017.) See Death Row, Mental Illness, and Representation.

Citation Guide