Avery Jenkins

Avery Jenkins’s case exposes what a death sentence can conceal: a lifetime of severe mental illness, disability, and failed care that his trial lawyers never brought before the court. Bryan Stevenson’s account moves from confused telephone calls and letters written in print so tiny they required a magnifying glass to read, through the devastating history those communications obscured, to a hearing that secured a new trial and removed Jenkins from death row. At its center is a recurring request for a chocolate milkshake—a small, concrete point of contact in a relationship otherwise shaped by illness, confinement, and the long work of making a person’s life legible to the law.

Identity and Early Encounters

Jenkins first contacted Stevenson by telephone, but he struggled to explain what he had been convicted of or what help he wanted. He complained about the conditions of his confinement, then abruptly switched topics when another thought came to him. His letters were similarly difficult to follow. Stevenson decided that meeting him in person might clarify how to help, while the tiny handwriting in Jenkins’s later letters gave Stevenson a different kind of evidence: it persuaded him that Jenkins’s illness had been present for a long time, rather than beginning only after imprisonment.

The case file described a brutal murder but said nothing about a disability. Jenkins had been convicted of stabbing an older man multiple times, and the court records did not refer to mental illness. The gap between the violent crime and the silence in the file prompted Stevenson to investigate further. Stevenson’s experience representing George Daniel, whose conviction was overturned after it emerged that a hospital evaluator had falsified his medical credentials, had made him alert to how seriously a criminal record could misrepresent a mentally ill person’s history.

At the prison, Stevenson first encountered a correctional officer whose pickup truck was covered with Confederate flag decals and other images associated with the Old South. The officer challenged Stevenson about noticing it, then released his arm and allowed him to enter. The encounter left Stevenson angry at the guard and conscious of his own powerlessness. Inside, Jenkins greeted him warmly, grasping his hand with both of his and smiling broadly. Before Stevenson could properly introduce himself, Jenkins asked whether he had brought a chocolate milkshake.

A Childhood Shaped by Abandonment

Stevenson initially began asking questions, but Jenkins answered with single words or grunts. Stevenson realized that Jenkins was still focused on the milkshake. He stopped the interview, apologized for not bringing one, and promised to try next time. Jenkins’s smile returned and his mood brightened. Prison records showed that he sometimes experienced psychotic episodes in which he screamed for hours; in person, he was generally kind and gentle, but plainly ill.

The investigation traced that illness through a childhood marked by loss and repeated disruption. Jenkins’s father had been murdered before he was born, and his mother died of a drug overdose when he was one. He entered foster care at two and had lived in nineteen foster homes before turning eight. Early signs of intellectual disability and cognitive impairment suggested possible organic brain damage; his behavioral problems also suggested schizophrenia and other serious mental illness.

At ten, Jenkins lived with foster parents whose rigid rules repeatedly set him up to fail. When he could not meet their requirements, he was locked in a closet, denied food, and beaten. His foster mother eventually took him into the woods, tied him to a tree, and left him. Hunters found him three days later in very poor health. After treatment for serious medical problems connected to the abandonment, he was returned to foster care. By thirteen he was abusing drugs and alcohol; by fifteen he was having seizures and psychotic episodes. At seventeen, officials deemed him incapable of management, and he was left homeless.

At twenty, during a psychotic episode, Jenkins wandered into a stranger’s house believing demons were attacking him. He stabbed a man to death, believing the victim was a demon. His lawyers had not investigated his earlier life before trial. Jenkins was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, leaving the history that might have explained his behavior—and informed a fair assessment of his culpability—outside the proceedings.

The Milkshake and the Hearing

The prison would not allow Stevenson to bring Jenkins a milkshake. Even after Stevenson explained this, Jenkins asked at the beginning of each visit whether he had brought one. Stevenson kept answering that he would try, partly because the familiar exchange helped Jenkins focus on other things. The request was not a substitute for legal work; it was a repeated point of connection as Stevenson prepared to bring forward evidence that had been absent from the trial.

At a hearing about three hours from the prison, Stevenson met Jenkins in a basement holding cell and tried to explain what would happen. He worried that seeing former foster-care witnesses might upset him, and that experts would speak directly about his illnesses and disabilities. Jenkins remained pleasant and agreeable. Over three days, experts described how organic brain damage, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder could combine to produce severe impairment. They explained that psychosis could lead to dangerous behavior, but that such behavior was a manifestation of serious illness rather than a measure of Jenkins’s character.

The hearing also examined the foster-care system that had failed him. Several former foster parents testified to their frustration and lack of preparation for his serious mental-health problems; several foster parents with whom he had been placed were later convicted of sexual abuse and criminal mismanagement of foster children. The evidence traced Jenkins’s passage from one harmful placement to another and the eventual consequences of drug addiction and homelessness. Stevenson argued that ignoring a mental disability when judging conduct was as unfair as demanding that a person who had lost his legs climb stairs without assistance, or that a blind person cross a busy highway unaided.

Stevenson did not argue that the killing required no response: the state had to hold Jenkins accountable and protect the public. His argument was that disregarding disability altogether distorted the judgment of culpability and the sentence imposed. Physical disabilities were commonly recognized as requiring accommodation, he observed, while less visible mental disabilities were more readily dismissed as failures of character. The case therefore concerned not only what Jenkins had done, but whether the legal process had understood the conditions under which he had done it.

Change, Outcome, and Significance

At a later visit, Stevenson began the familiar apology about the milkshake, but Jenkins interrupted to say he had received one and was all right. They then spoke about the hearing for an hour. Jenkins never asked for a milkshake again. The change marks a small but definite shift in their visits: the ritual that had repeatedly occupied his attention was no longer needed to begin their conversation.

Jenkins won a new trial and was removed from death row to a facility where he could receive mental-health treatment. The outcome did not erase the murder or claim that accountability was unnecessary. It recognized that a capital trial conducted without investigating profound illness and disability could not fairly measure the person or his responsibility. In Stevenson’s broader account, Jenkins stands among clients whose lives were shaped by mental illness, poverty, and institutional failure; his case makes the consequences of those forces specific through a childhood of nineteen foster homes, three days tied to a tree, and a courtroom that finally heard evidence the original trial had missed.