Prosecution witness: Eddie Espinoza — During D'Ambrosio's trial, a co-worker named Eddie Espinoza offered his version of what happened the night Klann was killed.
The pickup truck — Espinoza testified that he, D'Ambrosio and a man named Michael Keenan forced Klann into their pickup truck the night of September 23, Espinoza testified that they ordered Klann to help them find a man named Paul "Stoney' Lewis who had allegedly stolen drugs from them.
According to court documents , Espinoza testified the trio grew frustrated with Klann when they failed to track Lewis down. Michael Keenan — According to his statement to police , Espinoza said Keenan cut Klann's "throat with a big knife" and threw him into Cleveland's Doan Creek. Keenan then handed the knife to D'Ambrosio and said "finish the job," according to Espinoza's statement. Espinoza told police he then heard Klann scream, "Please don't kill me.
I heard him in the water. I never saw Anthony after that," according to the statement. Crime scene: Doan Creek — Ernest Hayes was among the first police homicide detectives at the crime scene, according to his affidavit.
Crime scene: Doan Creek — According to the affidavit, it was Hayes' opinion that " Anthony Klann was not murdered at Doan Creek, but he was murdered elsewhere and his body was dumped at Doan Creek. Court of Appeals. Hayes' statement directly disputed Espinoza , who said D'Ambrosio killed Klann in the creek. Arrested — Police arrested D'Ambrosio at his apartment.
D'Ambrosio said he had been honorably discharged from the Army a few years earlier, and had no criminal record. Evidence: Bloody bandage — This police crime scene photo shows a blood-soaked bandage found in D'Ambrosio's apartment. Evidence: Blood trail — Several trails of blood, seen in this police crime scene photo, were found in the apartment hallway.
Evidence: Knife on sink — This police crime scene photo shows one of several Bowie knives recovered from D'Ambrosio's apartment. Evidence: Two additional knives — Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth Balraj stated in court documents that all Klann's "knife wounds could have been caused by" a knife that police said was found in D'Ambrosio's apartment. However, she also said "it was possible that another knife could have been involved in the murder.
Kookoothe's two discoveries — Kookoothe, a Roman Catholic priest who also is a trained nurse and attorney, agreed to look into D'Ambrosio's case. Kookoothe said the severe neck wound Klann suffered would have made it impossible for Klann to have spoken the words "please don't kill me," as Espinoza told police.
Next, Kookoothe remembered that a reporter named Martin Kuz had told him Klann had been subpoenaed to testify at a rape trial. Kookoothe's research found that the man whose trial Klann was subpoenaed for was none other than Paul "Stoney" Lewis. Immediately after the alleged rape, Klann walked in on the two men -- which gave Longenecker a chance to escape, Longenecker testified.
Longenecker said Klann knew he was upset. Longenecker told Klann that "something had just happened," and Longenecker suspected Klann understood what that meant, according to the testimony. Paul 'Stoney' Lewis — Later, Longenecker, according to court documents , was subpoenaed to testify against Lewis, shown here.
But Longenecker misread the subpoena and missed the trial date. As a result, the rape indictment against Lewis was dismissed. If Longenecker's story had been introduced as evidence in D'Ambrosio's trial, it "would have Free after two decades: Joe D'Ambrosio — The undisclosed conclusions about the crime scene and about Klann's role in the rape case were enough to overturn D'Ambrosio's conviction. Before the state could retry him, Espinoza died.
The state's appeal went to the U. Supreme Court, which in refused to consider the case. Finally, after more than 20 years on death row, D'Ambrosio could move on as a free man.
He has a civil lawsuit pending against the state of Ohio, Kookoothe said, which D'Ambrosio hopes will yield compensation for his ordeal. Death Row Story: John Thompson — John Thompson was just weeks away from being executed when his legal team discovered evidence that saved his life.
Thompson's story has become legendary in legal circles, leading all the way to the U. Supreme Court. Click through the photos for details.
The victim — Liuzza was approached by someone on the sidewalk outside his apartment, where he was robbed, shot and later died in hospital. According to U. Supreme Court documents, police surreptitiously recorded Perkins telling the family, "I don't mind helping [you] catch [the perpetrator], Perkins said Thompson had an accomplice named Kevin Freeman.
Kevin Freeman — Police arrested Freeman, who admitted to being at the Liuzza murder scene but told police it was Thompson who pulled the trigger. After testifying for the prosecution, Freeman was charged and convicted of being an accessory to the murder and was sentenced to five years in prison. Thompson arrested — Also arrested was Thompson, who said he was innocent. Thompson had never been convicted of a violent crime.
Under the law, prosecutors could not seek the death penalty unless Thompson had a previous violent crime conviction. While Thompson was in jail, prosecutors accused him in a violent carjacking case. Prosecutors tried Thompson in that case and a jury convicted him. With a previous felony now on his record, prosecutors were able to seek the death penalty against Thompson in the Liuzza case.
He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Weeks from death — Louisiana set Thompson's final execution warrant for May 20, With just weeks left until the scheduled execution, appellate attorneys Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney had run out of appeals. The situation was desperate. Never-before-seen evidence photos — Thompson's legal team — including private investigator Elisa Abolafia — wondered why blood evidence in the carjacking case had never been introduced during Thompson's first trial.
CNN's "Death Row Stories" obtained crime scene photos of the carjacking blood evidence which have never before been made public.
This image shows blood on the victim's pants. Private investigator Elisa Abolafia — If prosecutors were so sure Thompson was the carjacker, they would have tested his blood and presented the test results as evidence, Abolafia told CNN's "Death Row Stories. Blood type unveils the truth — But for some reason, prosecutors had not presented the blood evidence. Thompson's legal team needed to find out if Thompson's blood type matched the blood report evidence in the carjacking case.
Carjacker's blood: Type B — This New Orleans police report says the stains on the victim's pant leg tested "positive" for "group B human blood. To prove Thompson wasn't the carjacker, Thompson's legal team needed to determine Thompson's blood type. Thompson's blood: Type O — Thompson had been treated years ago for an injury at a local hospital. Abolafia begged someone she knew there to help her. It's a matter of life and death. Please dig it up for me.
It was the carjacking conviction that led to Thompson receiving the death penalty. The blood type evidence blew the case wide open, and saved Thompson from being executed. Hair style offers more proof — The blood evidence led to the discovery of other information that Thompson's defense attorneys had not been made aware of, Thompson's lawyer Gordon Cooney told CNN's "Death Row Stories. That description supported Thompson's case, because at the time he wore his hair in a big bushy Afro style, while Freeman had close-cut hair.
Freeman died in This time, jurors reached a different verdict: not guilty. After 18 years, Thompson was free. But the case was appealed to the U. Supreme Court, where the award was denied in a decision. Thompson has founded a nonprofit organization aimed at rehabilitating people who have been exonerated of crimes and released from prison. More on Elmore's case. In another case, Gloria Killian's lawyers found a previously unknown letter written by a key witness to a prosecutor in her murder trial.
Federal appellate Judge Michael Daly Hawkins said the letter made the witness's testimony worthless and ordered Killian freed. Killian had lost 17 years of her life during her prison ordeal. More on Killian's case. Ohio prisoner Joe D'Ambrosio spent more than 20 years on death row until a judge dismissed all charges against him because D'Ambrosio's lawyers were not allowed access to evidence that could have proved him innocent. More on D'Ambrosio's case. In Louisiana, John Thompson, convicted of murder, was freed after lawyers uncovered previously unknown evidence that a witness had wrongly identified him as the killer.
More on Thompson's case. Other "Death Row Stories" focus on prisoners who remain on death row for crimes that still have many unanswered questions.
One such case involves former Florida police officer James Duckett, who faces execution for the rape and strangling death of an year-old girl. His lawyers are hoping for a new evidence hearing that they feel could result in his freedom. Photos: The killing of Teresa McAbee. The killing of Teresa McAbee — In , the area surrounding this pump house and dirt road in Mascotte, Florida, became the scene of a crime with repercussions that are still being felt nearly 30 years later.
Click through the gallery for details of the case, including more crime scene and evidence photos from CNN's "Death Row Stories. She left to buy a pencil — The night of May 11, , Teresa left her mother Dorothy McAbee's home in Mascotte, walking alone to a nearby Circle K convenience store to buy a pencil.
The crime scene: Knight Lake — Later, a resident reported a girl's body floating in nearby Knight Lake, not far from the pump house and dirt road. It was Teresa McAbee. An autopsy showed she had been raped, strangled and thrown into the water. Tire tracks — Investigators found tire tracks along that road near the body. The tracks matched the pattern of police cars driven by the Mascotte Police Department, including Officer Duckett. Duckett's patrol car — When Duckett arrived at the crime scene, his police cruiser was impounded for further investigation.
Fingerprints matching Teresa's were found on the car hood. Duckett becomes a suspect — Police questioned Duckett, who denied that Teresa ever sat on the hood of his cruiser. He was charged with sexual battery of a minor and first degree murder. The Supreme Court affirmed his sentence.
But around 20 days after that announcement, then-Governor John Hickenlooper signed a temporary reprieve for Dunlap that stayed his execution. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Log In. Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Dunlap's sister, Adinea, tried to break up the fights and steer her brother clear of Jerry when the minister was in one of his moods. But she was fighting battles of her own.
Over the years, while Jerry Dunlap physically abused Nathan, he wreaked a different type of havoc on Adinea. Nathan realized this one day when he descended into the basement of the family's home and found his father sexually assaulting her. Always trying to protect her brother, Adinea pretended that they were only "playing. After that day, Adinea now says, "Jerry's abuse of Nathan took on a vengeful intensity. Petty crimes turned into more serious robberies. He was just 15 and becoming increasingly violent when a social worker told him that Jerry—the only father he'd ever known, the father whose name he carried, the father who beat him, the father who was sexually assaulting his sister—was not his biological father.
Dunlap's attorneys laid these facts before the jury without, again, calling so much as a single expert to attempt to assign them meaning. So what if the likes of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group, reports that exposure to violence at a young age increases an adolescent's propensity for violence by as much as 40 percent?
Especially considering the closing statement from Dunlap's own attorney. What road can anyone go down that could take them to the point where they could make the choices that were made at Chuck E. I still don't know If you choose to kill my client under the facts of this case, I will respect your decision and you will hear not one word of criticism of you from me.
The weak defense paled, too, in comparison to what the victims' families said in court. They had been warned not to talk directly to the defendant, but they couldn't help it.
Then something in Dunlap broke, or broke more. He started to rave and rant in a three-and-a-half-minute monologue that left him sobbing uncontrollably, "Kill me right now. I have [had] enough of this motherfucking shit. You can take me to the motherfucking little chair and do what the fuck you want. It was nearly midnight, and Thill, a white supremacist, had been drinking for several hours. He pulled a gun, pointed it at Dia, and asked him, "Are you ready to die for being a nigger?
Thill noticed bystander Jeannie VanVelkinburgh. He couldn't have a witness to the murder, so he shot her too, leaving her paralyzed. Thill was arrested quickly, and confessed during a minute interview with District Attorney Bill Ritter. In a subsequent interview with a Channel 7 reporter, Thill said, "I see a black guy at the bus stop and I kind of decided he didn't belong where he was at and how easy it would be to take him out right there. In a war, anybody caught in an enemy uniform should be taken out.
Denver was outraged by the hate-filled murder, and the fact that innocent victims had been gunned down; both Dia and VanVelkinburgh had just gotten off work and were headed home. Ritter told the media that he'd seek the death penalty. As with the Dunlap case, the court of public opinion in Denver had already rendered its verdict, and the court felt compelled to order a change of venue—to the city of Pueblo—in the Thill matter so he could face a fair jury. The prosecution presented a straightforward case: Thill, an admitted skinhead, had killed Dia because he was black.
Thill had attempted to kill VanVelkinburgh because she was a witness to the murder. The district attorneys showed the jury the taped TV confession. VanVelkinburgh, who was paralyzed and couldn't be in court, offered a taped deposition as the prosecutors' star witness.
Thill was guilty, said the district attorneys. He deserved to die. The court appointed lawyer Sharlene Reynolds to head Thill's defense. She had already successfully defended another death-penalty case: In , she convinced a jury that Jon Morris—the man who'd raped and killed a five-year-old girl—hadn't intended to kill the child and had been out of his mind at the time.
Reynolds used the same strategy in this case: Thill had killed Dia, but Thill wasn't mentally stable and was incapable of forming the intent needed for first-degree murder. The defense steamrolled the prosecution. Reynolds presented more than 5, pages of evidence cataloging Thill's terrifying mental instability: He was beaten by his father before he was a year old, began receiving mental health care at five years old, started attempting suicide at age eight, was put on strong psychiatric medicine before he was 10, and spent most of his teen years in group homes and mental hospitals.
The defense hired psychologist Suzanne Bernhard to testify that Thill—whom she had evaluated several times before the trial and whose medical records she had received—was in a manic rage from his bipolar disorder at the time of the murder.
He couldn't be guilty of first-degree murder if he was in that state; the defense argued Thill deserved a conviction of second-degree murder, which would spare his life. After two days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked. Ten jurors wanted to convict Thill of first-degree murder, but there were two reluctant holdouts. Tom Mitscher, one of the jurors, later described Thill as "out in left field somewhere. Instead of retrying the case, Bill Ritter and the DA's office gave the defense an offer: If Thill would plead guilty to first-degree murder, they wouldn't seek the death penalty.
The defense agreed, despite the fact they had just argued against a first-degree conviction. They had accomplished their narrow goal: saving Thill's life. The correctional officers wouldn't stop taunting Dunlap. It was October 13, , and on that day the state of Colorado was executing Gary Lee Davis, a convicted rapist and murderer. He was the first man whom the state had put to death in 30 years. The guards reminded Dunlap that his last days were looming; that he, too, would be led to a table, where IVs would be threaded into his veins, and he would wait as his heart pushed three poisons into his body.
The first would render him unconscious. The second would paralyze him. The final, lethal poison would stop his heart. Two short minutes later, he would be dead. As Dunlap waited in his cell, paused between life and death, he smeared feces on his mouth. It was a manic breakdown, doctors realized, and one that would lead to a mental-health diagnosis: Nathan Dunlap has bipolar disorder. Characterized by episodic mood swings between two poles—mania and depression—bipolar disorder can take up to 10 years or more to diagnose.
A pattern of mental shifts must be established, but the rate at which a person cycles between the poles varies dramatically. If a doctor evaluates a person between shifts, identifying the symptoms—sexual promiscuity, recklessness, delusions of grandeur, to name a few—is a struggle. Dunlap, as doctors would piece together, had an earlier manic episode, on Valentine's Day in Normally a quiet prisoner, something, it seemed, was disturbingly wrong with Dunlap, who was then awaiting his criminal trial.
A guard watched as he quietly read Bible passages at one moment and then ran to the window screaming obscenities at the next. He was moved into a rubber-walled room and placed on suicide watch as his pandemonium continued.
He would tear off his clothes and spread feces on his body and the walls. The Arapahoe DA's office had been preparing its case for more than a year, but this breakdown could have changed everything: Was Nathan even sane enough to stand trial? A two-week stay turned into a nearly five-month evaluation. A defense expert found that during his stay in Pueblo, Dunlap showed signs of psychosis at least 10 percent of the time.
But the state's doctor was convinced Dunlap was faking and told the court so. On July 8, , Dunlap was deemed competent to stand trial.
And despite their own expert's odd evaluation, the defense avoided discussing his mental health or his unstable behavior at the mental health institute in Pueblo during the trial.
Bipolar disorder has a strong hereditary link. Children of a bipolar parent have a 14 percent chance—the rest of the population only has a 1 to 3 percent chance—of developing the disorder. In Nathan's family, his maternal grandfather, an uncle, and his mother, Carol, have all been diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Carol's struggle for a diagnosis was particularly turbulent, resulting in a half-dozen hospital stays that took her in and out of her childrens' lives. Shortly after Nathan's birth, she was hospitalized in Waukegan, Illinois, and Nathan was sent with Adinea to a foster home.
By the time he was two, the kids were back with Carol and on the move, stopping in Michigan for a time, and eventually ending up in Colorado in Nathan was A year or two later, according to court documents, Carol was formally diagnosed, but meanwhile she went through unmedicated periods when her symptoms would return.
Pre- and post-diagnosis, her manic swings were accompanied by corporal violence and left her hypersexualized. She'd walk around the house naked, stay up cleaning and moving furniture for days, and take a dozen baths in a hour period.
Nathan would sometimes wake at 3 a. When Dunlap was an infant, she once discarded him in the trash. She was hospitalized for trying to hurt Dunlap's younger brother, Garland, and has admitted that she hated Adinea since conception. For her three young children, living with Carol was a roller coaster of abandonment and abuse. By , things had changed. Adinea had moved out of the house and her lanky, all-elbows-and-knees brother was transforming.
As his robberies escalated—antisocial behavior that a social worker saw as a cry for help—and Dunlap was shuttled between juvenile detention centers, Carol started to wonder if her young son wasn't suffering from the same mental-health demons she struggled with. A evaluation while at a juvenile treatment center showed signs of a conduct or thought disorder. Another examination showed he was depressed. A psychiatrist thought he might have oppositional disorder, something akin to bipolar disorder.
Again and again, Dunlap was sent home without a diagnosis. He couldn't be suffering bipolar disorder. After all, he was just a kid, and kids didn't get bipolar disorder. Four years later, at the time of the Chuck E. Cheese murders, it was still uncommon to look for symptoms of bipolar disorder in children or teenagers. Doctors believed that these symptoms didn't manifest until after puberty, usually around the age of 19 or But today, doctors do diagnose children and adolescents.
When discovered in an adult subject, it is difficult to work backward and see when their symptoms first manifested. Early teenage evaluations may have missed mood patterns or simply dismissed them as adolescent angst.
Today, at least three doctors have agreed that Dunlap suffers from the disorder, but they all examined him after the trial and are unable to say with any certainty whether he suffered manic episodes earlier than that. Most important, they don't know if he suffered a manic break on December 14, , the date of the Chuck E.
Cheese murders. David Lane, an attorney who has been an advisor to Dunlap's defense, believes that Dunlap's trial attorneys should have done much more to explore the mental-health issue—no matter how murky the waters. While Dunlap's defense attorneys introduced Carol's mental health, they presented no medical expert to discuss what, if any, impact that had had on Dunlap. There was at least one doctor who was ready to help the defense—in fact, Dunlap's attorneys engaged her to do just that.
Psychiatrist Rebecca Barkhorn examined Dunlap at the time of the trial and expected to testify in the penalty phase that he suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder.
But the defense never called her. The defense also failed to provide her with Dunlap's complete charts from his time in Pueblo, reports that she wouldn't see until years later during the appeals process. When she did finally have the complete picture of Nathan Dunlap's family history and medical histories, she said that the information would have changed her original evaluation. If she had known then what she knows now, Barkhorn says, she would have testified that Dunlap suffered from bipolar disorder and that he had suffered from the disorder since birth.
Compared to states like Texas and Florida, it's incredibly difficult to secure a death sentence in Colorado. Until recently, juries in Texas and Florida were given an unbalanced choice: Sentence a heinous murderer for an execution, or he'd be up for parole eventually. They often chose death. Texas legislators refused to pass life-without-parole laws for years because capital punishment was an easy and popular way to prove they were tough on crime.
In the s, Texas, under the leadership of then-Governor George W. Bush, executed more than people; during the past 30 years, the state has been responsible for more than a third of the executions in the United States. Colorado has been far more judicious in its application of capital punishment since the U. Supreme Court confirmed that the death penalty was constitutional in , after a brief nationwide ban. While legislators have tinkered with the law in an attempt to increase executions, Colorado juries have been given the option to sentence a murderer to life in prison without parole since Juries like this option: They don't have to choose between life and death.
With a criminal forever locked behind bars, jurors can be secure knowing that society is safe from harm, and that they did justice. Owens got a death sentence in May for murdering a witness scheduled to testify against a friend of Owens' in his drug trial. Owens has been on death row for months; Dunlap has been there for 12 years, watching only one inmate, Gary Lee Davis, be executed, while all of the other death-marked inmates have been spilled back into life terms.
The reasons why one heinous murderer is sentenced to death while another heinous murderer is sentenced to life has less to do with the facts of the cases and more to do with happenstance and the prevailing political winds. Consider the death sentences prosecuted in Denver by DA Bill Ritter, who reserved capital-punishment trials for cases where he "reasonably believed we could get it. All of the defendants faced overwhelming evidence that they had committed horrible murders.
Still, none of those men will be executed. Jon Morris was the man that Ritter announced a trial date for during his reelection campaign. Morris had kidnapped, raped, and murdered a five-year-old girl of family friends in and confessed to police that he put her dead body in a Dumpster.
Morris' defense team, led by public defender Sharlene Reynolds, argued that because Morris had suffered childhood sexual and physical abuse, he wasn't mentally stable. Reynolds would use a similar argument to later get Nathan Thill a lifetime sentence. Though the jury ruled that Morris was sane at the time of the murder, they were convinced he hadn't intended to kill the young girl.
He was given a life sentence. A few years later, Ritter tried Jacques Richardson, a serial rapist who had hog-tied a year-old woman named Janey Benedict during a robbery in Benedict suffocated from the ties. Richardson confessed. Two years later, jurors ruled the murder was unintentional, and Richardson was given a life term. In other cases, Ritter instructed his prosecutors to use the mere threat of a death-penalty trial in order to get a conviction.
Those tactics weren't unusual: Across the state, prosecutors were happy to plea-bargain and avoid the cost, stress, and possible public failure of securing a death sentence. District attorneys realized that while the public, in theory, was eager to press executions, the reality was that such a reaction was more visceral than just, and that folks in the jury boxes were far more reluctant to exact an eye for an eye, a life for a life.
Colorado legislators, eager to please the vengeance-happy public, hadn't been sated. Denver wasn't sentencing anyone to death, and the suburbs and rural parts of the state weren't doing much better.
So, in , at the peak of capital punishment's groundswell, lawmakers attempted to ramp up executions. With the explicit public support of Ritter and other district attorneys around the state, legislators created three-judge panels—not the juries that tried the case—to determine death sentences.
Still, legislators were stymied: even judges wouldn't give death orders. A three-judge panel refused to execute Donta Page—who brutally raped, robbed, and stabbed year-old Peyton Tuthill to death in —claiming that his murder lacked "diabolical frenzy or hellish subhuman behaviors. The politics of killing and the law continued to collide. In , the U. Supreme Court found that the death-sentencing scheme of the three-judge panels cooked up by the Colorado legislators was unconstitutional, because those panels do not represent a trial by peers.
Five Colorado men on death row had their sentences vacated; five murderers destined for lethal injection received a reprieve because they had committed their crimes while the legislature was tampering with the law. He tried death-penalty cases, but rarely, and only when he thought he could get the ultimate conviction.
As Ritter's tenure as district attorney stretched into the 21st century, death-penalty cases became increasingly rare in Colorado. Prosecutors had tried about a half-dozen death-penalty cases annually in the late s through the late s, but by the time Ritter stepped down in , the state average had dropped to one or two a year.
Of course, those statistics provided no comfort to Dunlap. In the 15 years since Nathan Dunlap killed four people at the Chuck E. The original trial had more than 21, pages of discovery materials alone, listed more than potential witnesses, and lasted five weeks.
Twelve Coloradans were asked to judge whether Dunlap should live or die. But, if Nathan had a choice, no juror would have been in a Colorado Springs courtroom trying to decide whether he should be sent to death row. Just days after the first anniversary of his crime in , Nathan offered a plea bargain to the Arapahoe County DA's office: If the state agreed not to kill him, Dunlap would plead guilty to four charges of murder and accept his punishment.
He would never leave prison. But Gallagher's office was adamant; Dunlap would face death. The offer was summarily rejected. There would have been no trial that cost millions. There would have been no appellate process that's cost millions. He would have been another prisoner in the system. The Colorado Supreme Court rejected Nathan's first appeal in and another in A year later, the U. Supreme Court refused to look at the case. Just over six years ago, in , the original trial court granted Dunlap's request for a Crim.
The hearing lasted an unprecedented 52 days and gave Dunlap a second chance at presenting his case. This time, Dunlap's new attorney, Philip Cherner, would call witnesses, put expert after expert on the stand in front of the same Judge John Leopold that had presided over the first trial.
And there was something there. While the court would only look at evidence relating to the time of the trial—meaning that Dunlap's manic break was out—Cherner kept plugging away at what a mess the original trial counsel had made.
The court agreed, going so far as to vacate two minor sentences and declaring that Dunlap's trial counsel had been deficient. It might have been a stunning decision—if it were not for the caveats. Because of what the judge described as "overwhelming" evidence of Dunlap's guilt, the court declared that the attorneys' performance was "ineffective" but did not fall below a constitutionally acceptable bar.
The court went on to acknowledge that while more was known about bipolar disorder, it was irrelevant. As for Dr. Barkhorn, "she could have been a valuable asset for the defense if she had had all of the [medical and mental-health] materials. Barkhorn's testimony would have been helpful, the evidence "probably would have been unpersuasive here. In other words, even though the defense was deficient, experts weren't called to testify, and Dr. Barkhorn was not given full access to Dunlap's record, the court found that no juror would have been swayed.
Effectively, the court guessed that even if these issues were dealt with during the original trial, all 12 jurors would still have voted for death. Nathan Dunlap appealed again, this time to the state's highest court, the Colorado Supreme Court.
If his trial counsel had been deficient, so went the appellate argument, didn't that impact the jury? In May , the Colorado Supreme Court said no.
And in a unanimous decision the state Supreme Court struck down the lower court's deficiency finding. All of Nathan Dunlap's legal hopes have been exhausted in the state courts. Today, prisoner No. District Court, where yet another team of attorneys—this time a federal public defender, Madeline Cohen—will submit arguments similar to those made time and again to the state judges. Cohen declined to comment for this story and advised Dunlap to not comment.
While this legal phase will linger for as much as three or four years, there's little to no reason to expect a different outcome, meaning there's little to no chance the federal court will change Dunlap's death sentence. Thus far, Dunlap has spent months in prison; the troubled boy is now a young dead man walking.
Perhaps the only time when Nathan Dunlap's life and mind were not enveloped by chaos, abuse, and psychosis came just a few months before that December night inside the Chuck E. Dunlap's mother and father, Carol and Jerry, were in Tennessee working on their marriage, and Carol left Nathan in the care of a coworker and friend, Benton Jordan. Jordan, a tall man with gray hair and earrings in both ears, and who now works at a pottery store, watched Dunlap for two or three weeks.
He just needed a stable home. That's exactly what Jordan was doing one day—watching over Dunlap—when he saw a curious thing. He'd assigned Dunlap the age-old summer chore of staining the deck. From a window, Jordan watched as the kid dipped the brush in a polyurethane stain and began coating the weathered boards. Dunlap worked for a while, then paused, scooped something up in his hands, and gently set it aside, out of the way. Jordan was intrigued. He asked Dunlap what it was that he had moved.
A beetle, Dunlap told him, had crawled into the path of his brush.
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