Louisiana Capital Clemency:
The Only Fix For a Broken System
In June 2023, 56 of Louisiana’s death row prisoners filed clemency petitions asking Governor John Bel Edwards and the Board of Pardons to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
These clemency applications point to profound systemic flaws in the Louisiana death penalty, including dramatic racial disparity, a shocking number of death-sentenced prisoners with evidence of intellectual disability, significant geographic concentration, and widespread prosecutorial misconduct that has resulted in innocent people being sentenced to death.
“
“
[Louisiana’s] death penalty system is broken beyond repair.
Capital Appeals Project, Memorandum on the Death Penalty in Louisiana
Louisiana Death Penalty in Numbers
This data was compiled by the Louisiana Capital Appeals Project.
Read the Capital Appeals Project’s memo on Louisiana’s broken death penalty system, HERE.
THE ISSUES
-
Louisiana’s death penalty is overwhelmingly imposed on people of color. 42 of the 57 people under a death sentence are people of color, including 38 Black people. This means that 74% of those under a death sentence in Louisiana are people of color, and 67% are Black. Yet only 33% of Louisiana’s population is Black.
Many of the cases of the Black people on Louisiana’s death row carried racial overtones. There are Black men currently on the row who were sentenced to death by all-white juries, and there is evidence that jurors in some cases openly discussed race during their deliberations.
Louisiana’s death row population also reflects the well-documented reality that those who are convicted of killing a white person are significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than are those who kill Black people. Today, there are only two white people under a death sentence for killing Black victims. At the same time, 63% of the people on Louisiana’s death row (36/57) were convicted of killing a white person.
No white person has ever been executed for killing a Black person in Louisiana. Twenty-four of the 28 people executed since 1976, including all four of those executed since 1999, were convicted of killing a white victim.
As will be seen below, race correlates strongly with other serious problems in Louisiana’s death penalty system, including wrongful conviction, intellectual disability, youth, and geographic disparity.
-
Louisiana’s death penalty system is woefully error-prone, with an 83% reversal rate in capital cases since 1976. Since 1999, when Louisiana death row prisoners finally gained a right to counsel in post-conviction proceedings, nine people have been exonerated following wrongful capital convictions and death sentences.
The racial disparity in Louisiana’s death penalty is reflected in its wrongful capital convictions. Six of the nine innocent people exonerated from death row are Black, while three are white. Seven of the nine were falsely convicted of killing white victims.
-
The United States Supreme Court has made clear that the Constitution forbids the execution of people with intellectual disability. This rule recognizes that people with intellectual disability lack the moral culpability required for capital punishment, and that they are uniquely vulnerable to being manipulated by accomplices or pressured into false confessions.
And yet, there are at least 23 people under a death sentence in Louisiana – fully 40% of the state’s death row population – who have a documented intellectual disability. In this respect as well, Louisiana imposes capital punishment in a racially skewed manner. Nineteen of these 23 prisoners with evidence of intellectual disability are Black, and four are white.
-
The Supreme Court has acknowledged that scientific advancements regarding late-adolescent brain development must change our understanding of young offenders’ culpability, particularly that of young men. Nevertheless, 27 of the 57 people on Louisiana’s death row were 25 or younger at the time of the crime, and nearly half of those were 21 or under.
Moreover, 22 of those 27 prisoners are Black and one is Hispanic; only four are white. Even more disturbing, 14 prisoners in this young-offender group have documented intellectual disability, and 13 of those are Black. This disparity reflects the criminal justice system’s entrenched unwillingness to give young Black men, including those with intellectual disability, the kind of second chances that younger white offenders often receive.
-
Louisiana’s death penalty is heavily concentrated in just two parishes, Caddo and East Baton Rouge, which account for 42% of the state’s current death sentences. Moreover, just seven of Louisiana’s 64 parishes (Caddo, East Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Ouachita, Calcasieu, Orleans, and Rapides) account for 70% of the State’s current death sentences and are the only parishes that have imposed three or more active death sentences.
Significantly, there has not been a new death sentence in East Baton Rouge Parish since 2015, or in Caddo Parish since 2013. Louisiana’s death row thus is a relic of a past era of prosecutorial overreach in capital cases.
The seven high-use parishes have overwhelmingly imposed death sentences on Black people. Eleven of the 13 death sentences from Caddo Parish and all 11 of those from East Baton Rouge Parish were imposed on Black people. All four prisoners sentenced to death from Jefferson Parish are people of color (three Black men and one Hispanic man), and all three death row prisoners sentenced from Orleans Parish are Black. Together, the seven high-use parishes prosecuted 31 of the 38 Black people on Louisiana’s death row.
-
The job of a prosecutor is to serve the people and do justice. But, as the significant number of exonerations from Louisiana’s death row indicates, this principle is often subordinated to a “win at any cost” mentality. Many of the prisoners on Louisiana’s death row today were convicted and sentenced in cases where prosecutors withheld favorable evidence, presented false testimony – often of unreliable jailhouse snitches – or relied on flawed and misleading forensic evidence.
-
A majority of the people on Louisiana’s death row (39/57) have been diagnosed with serious mental illness and/or brain damage. A similar number are known to have suffered extensive childhood trauma, including horrific and prolonged physical, emotional and sexual abuse, poverty, neglect, domestic and community violence and more. These individuals are not the “worst of the worst.” They are vulnerable people who were failed by the caregivers and institutions intended to protect them.
The true rate of mental illness, brain damage and extreme childhood trauma on Louisiana’s death row is likely even higher than these numbers indicate. Many prisoners have never had comprehensive mental health, neurological, trauma or social history evaluations because their trial lawyers failed to do that all-important work and they are still waiting for the overburdened state post-conviction defense system to investigate their cases.
Louisiana Law on Capital Clemency
EXPERT REPORTS
REPRESENTATIVE CASES
Representative Cases of Louisiana’s Broken Death Penalty System
LaDerrick Campbell
Mr. Campbell represented himself at trial despite having schizophrenia and being intellectually disabled.
-
Instead of granting defense counsel’s request for a sanity commission, the trial judge allowed LaDerrick Campbell to represent himself.
LaDerrick Campbell’s disconnect from reality was readily apparent during his capital murder trial. In the middle of jury selection, his attorney asked the judge to suspend proceedings and appoint a sanity commission. “Frankly, I don’t know if Mr. Campbell is losing his mind,” said the lawyer.
Throughout jury selection, Mr. Campbell had been complaining to the judge that multiple people in the courtroom – including prosecutors, his own attorneys, prospective jurors and court staff – were using covert hand signals to communicate secretly with one another about finding him guilty. Despite these facts, the judge denied the lawyer’s request for a sanity commission. Worse still, just three days later the court allowed Mr. Campbell – a 21-year-old 9th-grade dropout – to fire his lawyers and represent himself for the remainder of his capital murder trial.
Had the court appointed a sanity commission, Mr. Campbell likely would not have been found competent to stand trial. He certainly was incompetent to represent himself. Indeed, when a prosecutor later claimed that Mr. Campbell was ‘effective” in his cross-examinations, the trial judge scoffed, “you don’t believe that.”
Mr. Campbell’s condition has only deteriorated since trial.
Mr. Campbell was just 18 years old when he was arrested. Two decades later, it is clear that he is profoundly mentally ill.
In 2011, Mr. Campbell’s appellate attorneys filed an emergency petition alleging that he is now so clearly insane that it would be unconstitutional to execute him. The petition described counsel’s extreme inability to communicate with Mr. Campbell about his defense, and then referred to him as “the most profoundly mentally ill client” his experienced capital defense attorneys had ever met.
Mr. Campbell’s prison records document his history of bizarre medical complaints, auditory hallucinations, delusions about being married with children, and placement on suicide watch. Following the only clinical interview with Mr. Campbell since before his trial, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with “chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, currently psychotic,” and as “possibly mentally retarded.”
Mr. Campbell also has a documented intellectual disability.
In fact, Mr. Campbell has IQ scores in the 60s, meaning that he is a person with intellectual disability. This should make him constitutionally exempt from the death penalty, yet he remains on death row.
Mr. Campbell’s intellectual impairments are well documented in school records. He was held back in second grade and placed in special education in fourth grade. In eighth grade, he scored in the 1st percentile on standardized testing, and he dropped out in ninth grade. He was never able to earn his GED. There is no official record of his employment, though he may have worked odd jobs.
A case that exemplifies Louisiana’s broken death penalty system.
LaDerrick Campbell’s life and case offer a microcosm of Louisiana’s broken death penalty system, which disproportionately condemns young Black men with intellectual disability and mental illness.
Like 67% of Louisiana’s death row prisoners, Mr. Campbell is Black. He is one of 23 people under a death sentence in Louisiana despite evidence of intellectual disability, 19 of whom are Black. He also is among the 27 of Louisiana’s 57 death row prisoners who were 25 or younger at the time of the crime, and 22 of those young offenders also are Black.
Mr. Campbell also was sentenced to death by a Caddo Parish jury. Caddo, along with East Baton Rouge, accounts for 42% of Louisiana’s current death sentences, and 22 of the 24 death sentences from those two parishes were imposed on Black people.
Louisiana Supreme Court direct appeal decision Petition asserting Ford incompetence to be executed
Daniel Blank
Mr. Blank is an innocent man on Louisiana death row whose conviction rests on a false confession.
-
The State of Louisiana has acknowledged that no evidence other than his confession connects Daniel Blank to the 1997 murder of Lillian Philippe. According to the former District Attorney himself, “Almost all of our evidence is derived from the taped confession. This case, and every other case against him is based on that. If it fell, the whole thing would fall.” That purported confession followed more than 12 hours of relentless questioning by teams of police, with no attorney present. Mr. Blank, a petit man with intellectual deficits and a history of severe trauma, was particularly vulnerable to these coercive interrogation tactics. Mr. Blank can also be seen clenching his chest and passing out during the course of the videotaped interrogation. The resulting confession was riddled with factual inaccuracies and physical impossibilities.
Mrs. Philippe’s murder was one of several home-invasion homicides in Louisiana’s River Parishes in 1996 and 1997. As the Chief of Police admitted, they were under intense public pressure to crack the case: “We were running into dead ends. It seemed like every suspect we may have come up with was eliminated. There was a lot of fear going around the community. You had to really keep everybody happy.” Coercing a confession out of Daniel Blank, notwithstanding the fact that one of the surviving victims said Mr. Blank was not their attacker, was their last ditch effort to close the books on these cases.
The police collected hundreds of pieces of evidence at the scenes of each homicide to which Mr. Blank confessed, including DNA and fingerprint evidence. None of that forensic evidence connected Mr. Blank to any of the crime scenes. The State and the defense knew this at the time of his trial, but misled the jury by failing to inform them that DNA and fingerprint evidence linked someone else to several of the murders.
This case closely resembles the Louisiana wrongful conviction case of John Floyd in which Floyd confessed to committing two murders despite the absence of physical evidence connecting him to the crime scenes. After Floyd spent decades in prison, the courts finally acknowledged that the forensic evidence pointed to another, unidentified perpetrator, and Floyd was more than likely not responsible for either of the murders to which he confessed. See https://ip-no.org/what-we-do/client-representation/freed-clients/john-floyd/.
More than 25 years later, Mr. Blank remains on death row. Desperate to prove his innocence, he was granted additional forensic analysis, but the State has thus far refused to comply. At the same time, the State also insists that Mr. Blank cannot obtain relief because he has been unable to prove who the actual perpetrator is. Mr. Blank’s case thus exemplifies the legal catch-22 that death row prisoners often face, which could result in an innocent man being executed.
Jimmie Duncan
Mr. Duncan was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime that never happened.
-
Jimmie Duncan is an innocent man. He was condemned to Louisiana’s death row through the use of fraudulent “scientific” evidence. The so-called bitemark evidence prosecutors used to turn a child’s tragic accidental death into a murder was completely made up – created by disgraced a “expert” who used a mold of Mr. Duncan’s teeth to make a mark on the victim’s cheek, which was then “matched” to Mr. Duncan. This misconduct was captured on video, but the court did not allow the jury to see this damning evidence of fraud. The only other evidence against Mr. Duncan was the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who has since recanted his claim that Mr. Duncan confessed.
When the toddler daughter of Mr. Duncan’s girlfriend drowned in a bathtub after he left her alone for a few minutes, he rushed to get help. Neither Mr. Duncan’s efforts at performing CPR nor lifesaving measures at the hospital were successful, and 23-month-old Haley Alyse Oliveaux died on December 18, 1993. Mr. Duncan was inconsolable at the police station, telling officers he had pulled Haley out of the tub and tried to get her to breathe. “I just want to bring her back,” he said.
Mr. Duncan was initially charged with negligent homicide on the grounds that his inattention had led to the child’s accidental death. Then things changed. Two disgraced forensic “experts,” Dr. Steven Hayne, a forensic pathologist whose shoddy work has been implicated in at least 6 wrongful conviction, and Dr. Michael West, a forensic dentist who is responsible for at least 7 wrongful convictions, claimed they found evidence of sexual abuse on Haley’s body and bitemarks on her cheek matching Jimmie Duncan’s teeth. These purported findings led Ouachita Parish prosecutors to upgrade the charges against Mr. Duncan to first-degree murder.
In 1998, Jimmie Duncan was convicted and sentenced to death. But his jury never saw a video proving that the bitemark evidence was manufactured by the dentist using a mold of Mr. Duncan’s teeth. Prosecutors chose not to call Dr. West, whose reputation was already beginning to crumble. Instead, after successfully excluding from the jury’s consideration the video of Dr. West manufacturing evidence, the prosecution called a different dentist. The dentist who actually testified never saw the West video and based his “bitemark” matching testimony on still photographs.
In the years since his trial, Mr. Duncan has steadfastly maintained his innocence. Reviewing experts have examined evidence such as emergency room photographs of Haley’s injuries and confirmed that the purported bitemarks do not appear. Further investigation also has revealed that prosecutors failed to preserve forensic evidence that could help prove Mr. Duncan’s innocence.
Moreover, new scientific evidence from three reputable, board-certified forensic pathologists demonstrates that the so-called evidence of sexual abuse Dr. Hayne testified to at trial was grossly unreliable speculation.
Mr. Duncan has been waiting for more than a decade for a court to order an evidentiary hearing on his claims of wrongful conviction and prosecutorial misconduct. In December 2022, Mr. Duncan filed an innocence petition based on a new Louisiana statute – La. C.Cr.P. art. 926.2.
Expert report of Dr. Judy Melinek
Percy Davis
Mr. Davis’s documented incompetence should bar his execution.
-
Percy Davis has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychosis, leaving him with no rational understanding of why Louisiana seeks to execute him. Based on the extensive evidence of Percy’s impairments, in 2005 the district court found him incompetent to execute. Records also document that Percy is a person with IQ scores in the intellectually disabled range. His incompetence would make Percy Davis’s execution unconstitutional, and his intellectual deficits also likely make his death sentence an Eighth Amendment violation, yet he remains on death row.
Extensive evidence of Percy’s mental impairments dates back to his early childhood.
Percy’s mental impairments have been documented since his early childhood. Before he turned three, Percy began to exhibit symptoms of developmental and behavioral abnormalities. He had difficulty swallowing and trouble speaking. Although practitioners noted his atypical behavior, he was never diagnosed or treated.
Percy struggled to learn basic academic skills and concepts from his earliest school years, failing every subject in first grade except for Conduct, in which he received a D. Percy’s behavioral issues made it difficult for him to interact with other children, and he was the constant target of taunting and bullying. His struggles continued throughout his school years yet he received no real interventions, and he left school after tenth grade.
Severe abuse and neglect contributed to his mental challenges.
The toxic family environment in which Percy was raised compounded his developmental challenges. His father was an alcoholic and his mother suffered from severe mental illness. She attempted to kill herself just a month before becoming pregnant with Percy’s sister, and was severely underweight and ill during her pregnancy with Percy.
Hospital records document that Percy sustained head injuries and other trauma resulting from his parents’ abuse and neglect. After Percy’s parents separated, his mother moved in with relatives. Percy had to share a room with his violent and mentally ill uncle, who subjected him to extreme and prolonged sexual, physical, psychological, and verbal abuse. These circumstances contributed to Percy’s serious mental illness and his later addiction.
A downward spiral culminated in armed robbery.
In 1987, at age 23, Percy joined the U.S. Army after having a friend pass the entrance exam for him. He was unable to adjust to army life and was discharged after a few months. He then spiraled into crack cocaine addiction and heavy drinking. He attempted suicide and was hospitalized. His condition deteriorated until June 1990, when he lost the last of a series of jobs.
Later that month, Percy was involved in a series of convenience store robberies, in two of which store employees were shot and killed. He was smoking crack and drinking heavily during this period.
Despite his obvious mental illness, Percy was not assessed for incompetence until the post-conviction period, but a judge has ruled him incompetent to execute.
Percy tried to kill himself while awaiting trial, but was not assessed for competency at that time. It was only during his post-conviction proceedings that his attorney recognized the severity of his condition.
Percy’s mental health has steadily deteriorated over the 32 years he has been incarcerated. Doctors at the Louisiana State Penitentiary have documented his severe mental illness, though they have not been able to establish a successful medication regimen.
In 2005, after reviewing extensive evidence, the district court ruled that Percy Davis is incompetent to be executed. And yet, 18 years later, he remains on death row.
Percy Davis’s case exemplifies Louisiana’s broken death penalty system.
In addition to his serious mental illness, Percy Davis’s case bears many of the hallmarks of Louisiana’s error-plagued death penalty system.
Although the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing people with intellectual disability, 40% of those on Louisiana’s death row today have evidence of intellectual disability. Percy Davis, like 19 of those 23 people with evidence of intellectual disability, is Black.
Louisiana has a propensity to condemn young Black men to death. Percy was just 25 at the time of the crime, an age at which the human brain remains immature, particularly in males (even without documented intellectual disability). Twenty-seven of the 57 people on Louisiana’s death row were 25 or younger at the time of their crime, 22 of these people are Black, including Percy.
Percy also was prosecuted in Caddo Parish, which together with East Baton Rouge accounts for 42% of all current Louisiana death sentences. Eleven of the 13 prisoners sentenced to death in Caddo Parish are Black.
Court ruling on competency, May 3, 2005
Competency hearing transcript, Nov. 3, 2004
Bobby Hampton
The prosecutor in Mr. Hampton’s case withheld evidence from the jury that Bobby was not the shooter. The victim’s sister opposes Mr. Hampton’s execution.
-
Bobby Hampton is on Louisiana’s death row while the person who actually shot the victim is serving a life sentence. This injustice is due to misconduct by the trial prosecutors who illegally withheld exculpatory evidence from the jury and Mr. Hampton’s defense team. Notably, the victim’s sister never wanted Mr. Hampton to be executed, but the prosecutors withheld that information too.
Prosecutor suppressed exculpatory evidence.
Mr. Hampton was charged with the 1995 murder of Russell Coleman, a convenience store clerk, who was shot during a robbery. In pursuing both a first-degree murder conviction and a death sentence against Mr. Hampton, the prosecutor insisted he was the shooter, but knowingly withheld evidence establishing that both of the eyewitnesses had identified another man as the shooter. At trial, one of those eyewitnesses recanted his sworn grand jury testimony, claiming that his “dreams” helped him to realize that Mr. Hampton must have been the shooter. The other eyewitness did not testify.
Neither defense counsel nor the jury learned that the missing eyewitness also gave sworn grand jury testimony identifying the shooter as Elbert Williams, who received a life sentence for his supposedly lesser role in the crime. In fact, Elbert Williams has repeatedly confessed to shooting Mr. Coleman. A third co-defendant, who like Mr. Hampton did not fire a weapon, received a 40-year sentence for manslaughter.
Victim’s sister urges Louisiana to stop the cycle of violence.
The prosecutors also withheld evidence that the victim’s sister, Charisse Coleman, opposed the prosecution’s decision to seek death in Mr. Hampton’s case. A letter to that effect was in the district attorney’s files but was not disclosed to Mr. Hampton’s trial attorneys. Ms. Coleman has urged Louisiana to end the cycle of violence perpetuated by executions.
Racial bias permeates Louisiana’s death penalty system.
Bobby Hampton’s case also reflects Louisiana’s racist death penalty system, the most racially skewed in the country. Mr. Hampton, a young Black man, was sentenced to death in Caddo Parish. 74% of Louisiana’s death row prisoners are people of color, and 67% are Black. Caddo Parish is responsible for the most current death sentences in the state, 13 of 58, and 11 of those convicted in Caddo Parish are Black. Further, like 64% of those on Louisiana’s death row, Mr. Hampton was sentenced to death for killing a white person. No white person has ever been executed in Louisiana for killing a Black person.
The jury did not hear important mitigating evidence.
In addition to being denied the evidence of Bobby Hampton’s lesser role in the crime, due to his trial lawyers’ incompetence, his jury did not learn about his traumatic childhood or severe mental illness. He and his six siblings were raised in extreme poverty in the Bottoms by their single mother; his father was killed before he was born. The neighborhood was plagued by violence and addiction. Mr. Hampton’s mentally ill mother brutally beat her children and flew into violent rages, sometimes setting the house on fire. Mr. Hampton also suffered brutal abuse at the Louisiana Training Institute, where he was sent at age 13. The jury never heard that Mr. Hampton suffers from chronic Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and neuropsychological impairments.
A life of redemption in prison.
During his decades in prison, Mr. Hampton has confronted his past and consistently worked to become a better person. He feels deep remorse for his involvement in the robbery and death of Russell Coleman. He is repentant, thoughtful, humble and committed to devoting the rest of his life to making amends for his past wrongs. His faith in Christ is deep and unwavering, and through his faith he has touched the lives of countless people around the world who have heard his story and witnessed his transformation.
Louisiana Supreme Court decision, including Justice Johnson’s dissent.
Grand jury testimony of Frank Tesnear
Michael Cooks
Mr. Cooks has been sitting on death row despite long-documented intellectual disability.
-
When Michael Cooks was nine years old, his tested IQ was just 54. He was unable to do ordinary childhood activities like swim or ride a bike. Even when he learned to ride a bike as a teenager, Michael still had to use training wheels. He could not tell time until around age twelve, a skill he learned only after his mother’s constant repetition (reinforced, as were many of her lessons, with harsh beatings). Michael was in high school before he grasped the concept of money; others took advantage of this, “splitting” shared funds with him unevenly. He struggled to engage with children his own age and was easily manipulated.
Despite Michael’s documented intellectual disability, which should have made him ineligible for a death sentence, he has been on Louisiana’s death row for more than 25 years for a shooting during a botched drug-related robbery.
Two independent experts have determined that Michael is a person with intellectual disability, but the court still has not vacated his death sentence.
In 2002, the district court appointed a commission to determine whether Michael is a person with intellectual disability and should therefore have his death sentence vacated. Two independent experts in intellectual disability were appointed to evaluate Michael. Both agreed that he was indeed intellectually disabled. Despite their unanimous findings, the district court has not yet made a determination and Mr. Cooks remains on Death Row.
Michael is deeply remorseful.
Michael has expressed deep remorse and accepts full responsibility for his actions and the harm he has caused. He says, “I feel terrible when I look back over my bad actions. My choices hurt a lot of people real bad . . . . I am deeply sorry about the harm I caused . . . . I was wrong. I was wrong. Life is precious. It is a gift from God. I had no right to take a life.”
Michael’s case reflects Louisiana’s broken death penalty system.
Michael is one of at least 23 people on Louisiana’s death row with evidence of intellectual disability. Like 19 of these individuals – and 67% of all Louisiana death row prisoners, Michael is Black.
Michael was sentenced to death in Caddo Parish, one of two jurisdictions in Louisiana that account for 42% of the state’s current death sentences. Eleven of the 13 death row prisoners who were convicted in Caddo Parish, including Michael, are Black.
Jeremiah Manning
Mr. Manning has been sitting on death row despite documented intellectual disability. The victim’s son opposes execution.
-
Like a shocking number of those on Louisiana’s death row, Jeremiah Manning was a young Black man with intellectual disability, convicted of killing a white person. Recognizing these systemic failings and seeking to honor his mother’s faith, the victim’s son strongly opposes Jeremiah’s execution.
The victim’s son vehemently opposes Jeremiah Manning’s execution.
Jeremiah Manning was convicted of robbing and murdering Mary-Ann Malone in December 2000. Mrs. Malone, a white woman, was a beloved member of the Plain Dealing community. Jeremiah’s entire trial lasted less than a week, resulting in a death sentence.
In recent years, one of Mrs. Malone’s sons, Brett Malone, has made clear that he does not want Jeremiah to be executed. With tremendous grace, Mr. Malone has testified before the Louisiana legislature to express his opposition to capital punishment both in general and specifically for Jeremiah Manning. Mr. Malone regrets that he did not speak up at the time of Jeremiah’s trial to ask the District Attorney not to seek the death penalty.
“Executing Jeremiah will not bring me or my family closure,” Brett Malone told the legislature. “It will not repair the wounds that we sustained. It will, instead, bring me and others more pain.” Mr. Malone told the legislature that he and his family “will be okay with [Jeremiah] living a long life in prison.”
Mr. Malone stressed that executions “take[] away all hope for reconciliation and redemption – or for any opportunities to repair the harm that we’ve sustained.”
Jeremiah Manning is a person with intellectual disability whose death sentence is unconstitutional.
Jeremiah was just two weeks past his 20th birthday at the time of the crime, and his lifelong cognitive deficits meant that he was functionally much younger.
Jeremiah grew up in poverty and isolation in rural Plain Dealing. He was gullible and easily manipulated by other kids. He did not start speaking until he was three and a half and when he finally did, he had a speech impediment.
Jeremiah struggled academically and socially throughout his childhood. He was held back in kindergarten, first grade, and ninth grade and often covered for his academic weaknesses with disruptive behavior. Although school officials repeatedly tried to have Jeremiah evaluated for special education needs, his family refused. Jeremiah ultimately dropped out in tenth grade.
Post-arrest IQ tests further documented Jeremiah’s intellectual deficits. Inexplicably, experts ultimately stated that he was just above the “mentally retarded” level. In reality, the wealth of evidence establishes that he is a person with intellectual disability whose execution would violate the U.S. Constitution.
Jeremiah’s case exemplifies Louisiana’s broken death penalty system.
Like Jeremiah, 67% of the people on Louisiana’s death row are Black, 63% were convicted of killing white victims, and 40% are people with intellectual disability. Moreover, of the 27 people on the state’s death row who were 25 or younger at the time of their crime, 22 are Black. Jeremiah’s case thus reflects the extreme racial skewing and other serious problems that make Louisiana’s death penalty system broken beyond repair.