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.

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