It’s hard to fathom a life more miserable than the life Renard Marcel Daniel has lived. Born into a world of chaos and violence, sexually abused as a child, laboring through his early teenage years in and out of school with significant intellectual disabilities, Daniel today sits in an Alabama prison for a double-murder he committed in September 2001. Convicted in 2003, he spent more than a decade on the state’s death row until, in 2016, he caught a break.
A random draw of federal appeals court judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spun out three jurists, all of them appointed by Democratic presidents, who found in Daniel’s appeals merit the state courts of Alabama had not found. The panel unanimously concluded in May 2016 that Daniel’s lawyers likely had failed to provide him with competent representation during the penalty phase of his trial. And so the 11th Circuit returned the case to the lower federal courts for an evidentiary hearing.
For years before this appeals court ruling, Daniel’s new lawyers had urged state attorneys to acknowledge their client’s obvious cognitive deficiencies. For years Daniel’s appellate attorneys had asked state judges to allow them to conduct discovery to highlight the ways in which trial attorneys had failed to present a reasonable defense for Daniel during the penalty phase of his case. And for years Alabama prosecutors and judges had refused. Didn’t just refuse on the merits of what Daniel’s attorneys were arguing but refused even to hold an evidentiary hearing to allow him to substantiate his claims.
[For more on this story by ANDREW COHEN, go to https://www.themarshallproject...e-poker?ref=hp-1-112]
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