Doyle Lee Hamm (pictured), an Alabama death row prisoner, has asked the United States Supreme Court to consider his case after Alabama’s state and federal appellate courts upheld an order in which the trial court rejected his appeal by adopting word-for-word an 89-page order written by the state attorney general’s office. In a process The Marshall Project’s Andrew Cohen described as “a sham,” the court dismissed Hamm’s appeal one business day after receiving the prosecution’s proposed order, without so much as removing the word “proposed” from the title of the order. In 1987, Hamm’s jury had taken only 45 minutes to sentence him to death after his lawyer presented a 19-minute case for life that involved just two witnesses—Hamm’s sister and a bailiff. Twelve years later, Hamm’s post-conviction lawyers argued that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel in that penalty hearing and presented the court with extensive mitigating evidence that his trial lawyer had never investigated. This evidence included a childhood diagnosis of borderline mental retardation, school records reflecting Hamm’s intellectual deficits, and evidence of seizures, head injuries, and drug and alcohol abuse. Cohen reports that the jury never heard that Hamm was “a barely literate, brain-damaged man with little impulse control, someone who might have been perceived as having diminished criminal responsibility.” Yet the attorney general’s proposed order, signed by the judge, rejected this evidence as merely “cumulative” of the sparse case for life that had been presented at trial. Cohen reports that the practice of judges adopting opinions or orders written by prosecutors, often without making any substantive changes or even correcting typos, is surprisingly widespread in capital cases. In addition to Alabama, similar “ghostwritten” orders have been documented in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. In one Ohio case, a judge was sanctioned for violating the judicial code of conduct and an inmate’s death sentence was vacated after the judge drafted an opinion with prosecutors, but in Hamm’s case and many others, opinions written by prosecutors and signed by judges have been upheld in state courts and considered reasonable determinations of fact to which courts must defer in later federal proceedings challenging the constitutionality of capital convictions and death sentences. The U.S. Supreme Court has requested that it be provided the full record of Hamm’s case and is scheduled to confer about the case on September 26. It could issue an order as early as October 3, the first Monday of its Fall Term, on whether it will hear Hamm’s appeal.
(A. Cohen, “The Death Penalty Case Where Prosecutors Wrote the Judge’s ‘Opinion’,” The Marshall Project, June 19, 2016; A. Cohen, “Letting Prosecutors Write the Law,” The Marshall Project, July 18, 2016.) See Arbitrariness.
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