Sampson wants off of death row
Today was the first day of a series of hearings in the case of Gary Sampson, a convicted triple-murderer who was sentenced to death back in 2004. Sampson, from Abington, MA, pleaded guilty to murdering three random, completely innocent people in a 2001 crime spree: Philip McCloskey, Jonathan Rizzo, and Robert “Eli” Whitney.
Two of the murders took place in Massachusetts and one in New Hampshire. Although Massachusetts does not have the death penalty, federal law allowed Sampson to be tried in federal court, where he received a death sentence.
Now, Sampson and his defense team have filed a habeas corpus petition, or 2255 petition, an attempt to get a new trial because he claims his constitutional rights were violated. In this particular petition, Sampson’s lawyers claim that his trial lawyers, including Robert Sheketoff and Stephanie Page (who represented Neil Entwistle) were ineffective.
I attended today’s hearing on the 2255 petition, which lasted for most of the day at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston. Family members of the victims were in the courtroom, as well as five lawyers representing Sampson and four federal prosecutors. Sampson is spending his time on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was not at the hearing.
The prosecutors have filed a motion for summary dismissal, a request to have Sampson’s petition thrown out without discovery or detailed arguments. At the hearing, Judge Mark Wolf ruled tentatively that he would deny the government’s motion and allow the 2255 petition to go forward, at least with respect to most of the issues the lawyers argued about today.
Sampson’s main complaint is that his trial lawyers failed to introduce adequate evidence of his history of mental illness during the penalty phase of the trial, which was essentially the only part, because he pled guilty. If it weren’t for their incompetence, Sampson’s team claims, at least one juror might have voted for life in prison.
According to defense attorney William McDaniels, Sampson fell ten feet down a flight of stairs when he was 4, was physically and emotionally abused, injured his head in about a dozen fights over the years, was in a car accident at age 20, jumped off a roof, was beaten in prison, and compounded these problems with drug and alcohol use. McDaniels says that Sampson is in the bottom 1% of the population in terms of mental functioning, and that he has bipolar disorder, as well as damage to the frontal, temporal, and occipital lobes of his brain, which combined to cause his recklessness, arrogance, and lack of remorse. However, little evidence was introduced at trial to corroborate these claims.
Sampson’s lawyers claimed that his trial attorneys failed to contact his family and friends in a timely fashion and did not try hard enough to get them to testify about his background and childhood. The prosecutors, on the other hand, defended the defense lawyers from the trial. They claimed that they tried all available means to contact Sampson’s family short of issuing subpoenas, but they refused to talk. Also, according to prosecutors, Sampson’s trial lawyers delayed contacting his family to give them time to get over the shock of learning of their son’s crimes, or decided against calling them to the witness stand because they would hurt Sampson’s case.
Additionally, both sides agreed that Sampson’s trial lawyers failed to introduce records from the Brockton Hospital of Sampson’s childhood head injury. Prosecutors downplayed this omission, arguing that it would not have changed the verdict.
The lawyers also argued about the credibility of a witness who downplayed the abuse Sampson suffered as a child. Sampson’s attorneys said that the trial lawyers should have impeached this witness, while the prosecutors, as they did throughout today’s hearing, maintained that the trial attorneys were competent and did a more than adequate job.
The arguments will continue tomorrow and most likely the day after. I’ll probably continue stopping by and will be sure to blog back with whatever I observe of the proceedings.