Jan. 7
ALABAMA:
1st death sentence changed in Alabama due to mental retardation
For the 1st time, a condemned Alabama killer has avoided the death penalty
because of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against executing the mentally
retarded.
In a 5-0 decision Friday, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals said the
death penalty can't be used against James Henry Borden Jr., who killed a
Lawrence County woman in front of her grandchildren a decade ago.
The judges agreed with the attorney general's staff that Borden's sentence
must be changed from death to life in prison without parole because of the
U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 decision that said mentally retarded killers
can't be executed.
"After reviewing the record and the findings of the circuit court, we find
that Borden is mentally retarded and therefore cannot be sentenced to
death," Judge Bucky McMillan wrote.
Clay Crenshaw, chief of the attorney general's capital litigation
division, said Borden is the 1st inmate in Alabama to get a new sentence
due to the 2002 ruling. He said the attorney general's staff agreed that
the sentence should be changed after IQ tests over a period of years
consistently showed that Borden was retarded.
The Court of Criminal Appeals noted that an expert in a recent lower court
proceeding determined Borden has an IQ of 53, and during his 1994 trial
two experts put his IQ at 65 and 66. All scores fall in the range of mild
mental retardation, the appeals court said.
Borden, 55, was convicted and sentenced to die for the Sept. 5, 1993,
murder of 63-year-old Nellie Ledbetter. She was sitting on the front porch
of her Lawrence County home when Borden stabbed her to death as her young
grandchildren watched.
Ledbetter's 11-year-old grandson, Josh, testified at the trial that Borden
was the man who fatally stabbed his grandmother when she refused to leave
with him.
Court records showed Borden had been convicted of another murder about 20
years earlier.
State and federal appeals courts have ordered hearings for other Alabama
death row inmates who have claimed mental retardation. Bryan Stevenson, an
attorney for Borden and director of the Equal Justice Initiative in
Montgomery, said he anticipates more decisions like Borden's.
"Until the Supreme Court ruled, we were not shielding people who were
mentally disabled from death sentences," he said.
One of Alabama's most widely known death row inmates, Glenn Holladay, has
a mental retardation hearing scheduled in March.
Holladay was sentenced to die for killing 3 people in Gadsden in 1986. In
May 2003, he was within 2 days of being executed when a federal appeals
court halted the execution and ordered that the convicted killer get
another chance to prove that he is retarded.
(source: Associated Press)
