Marsinah Johnson and Nikki Waller were teenage girls desperately trying to fit in when they crossed paths with Ahmond Dunnigan and his gang known as “Doom.”
Both girls faced unimaginable torture and murder at the hands of Dunnigan’s crew in separate incidents in Fulton and DeKalb counties in 1993.
A litany of legal setbacks led to Dunnigan pleading guilty and being sentenced to life without parole even though prosecutors in both counties agreed that if anyone deserved death, it was him. Fellow gang members involved in the murders also avoided death.
The AJC’s investigative series, published the week of Sept. 23, showed just how arbitrary death can be for Georgia’s convicted murderers. In fact, the series’ findings echoed the argument Supreme Court justices used 35 years ago when they invalidated the nation’s death penalty in Furman v. Georgia.
At the time, Justice Potter Stewart said capital punishment was “so wantonly and so freakishly imposed” that death sentences were cruel and unusual punishment. Another Georgia court case restored the death penalty a few years later and became the basis for new death penalty statutes in a number of other states.
Longtime AJC court reporter Bill Rankin suggested that the newspaper come up with a statistical approach to measure whether death sentences in Georgia were being applied arbitrarily or disproportionately.
“We found huge disparities in the way different courts and district attorneys applied the death penalty,” said Jim Walls, who edited the series.
“We found that only 4 percent of killers who are eligible for the death penalty actually get it, and that one reason was the fact that our statute was written so broadly that it covers most murders, including many that many DAs would never prosecute for death.”
Rankin and reporters Heather Vogell, Sonji Jacobs and Megan Clarke examined 1,315 murder convictions eligible for the death penalty from 1995 to 2004.
Among the findings:
* Only 29 of Georgia’s 132 most heinous murders resulted in a death sentence. Fifty of the state’s worst killers avoided death by pleading guilty. Some are eligible to receive parole.
* Similar circumstances can result in starkly different outcomes depending on where a murder occurs. Killers were twice as likely to get death if the victim was white.
* In doing proportionality reviews to justify death sentences, Georgia’s Supreme Court has repeatedly cited other cases that had been overturned.
* More juries are choosing life without parole over death.
“Fifty-seven people got the death penalty [in the decade we reviewed], but more than 1,250 others could have faced the death penalty in that time, and they all had victims who left behind friends and family, so there are actually many thousands of people directly affected by the way [the state] applies the death penalty,” said Walls. “Death penalty trials and the appeals cost millions of tax dollars more, according to some studies, than life imprisonment.”
To report the series, reporters visited more than 100 Georgia counties to examine court records and were surprised to find how incomplete some of the records were.
“You would think on such important cases the records would be fuller or richer,” said Clarke.
A checklist of more than 100 entries was used to gather consistent information on every case. They focused on the nature of the crime and the evidence, the court proceedings and aggravating circumstances that could trigger Georgia’s death penalty.
They also looked at the demographics of the killer and victim and their relationship. The newspaper asked two criminologists, who have never taken an advocacy position on the death penalty, to do an advanced analysis of the data.
The series, which has received significant reaction from readers, attorneys and judges, is an example of investigative journalism that newspapers are uniquely positioned to deliver.
On ajc.com, the series was enhanced with an interactive quiz, a video of Gordy Foust talking about his son Todd’s murder and a database of the cases examined.
To view the series, go to: www.ajc.com/deathpenalty.
