Avery Jenkins kills a man during a psychotic episode

Avery Jenkins kills a man during a psychotic episode, an act the book presents in the context of profound mental illness and a childhood marked by abuse and abandonment. The killing led to a rapid murder conviction and death sentence, while the failure to investigate Jenkins’s history left his illness and disabilities out of the case that determined his punishment.

Background

Jenkins’s childhood included severe abuse by foster parents. When he was ten, his foster mother took him into the woods, tied him to a tree, and left him; hunters found him three days later in very poor health. As he grew older, he began abusing drugs and alcohol, experienced seizures and psychotic episodes, and was eventually deemed incapable of management and left homeless. This history later became central to understanding the circumstances of the killing, but it had not been investigated before his trial.

The Killing and Conviction

At twenty, in the midst of a psychotic episode, Jenkins wandered into a stranger’s house because he believed demons were attacking him. Inside, he stabbed a man to death, believing the man was a demon. The account links the act to Jenkins’s delusion without diminishing the fact that a man was killed.

Jenkins’s lawyers had conducted no investigation into his history before trial. He was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The omission meant that evidence of his profound mental illness and disabilities—material later presented as relevant to his criminal culpability and sentence—was absent when the court first considered his case.

Significance in the Case

The killing became the point from which the later challenge to Jenkins’s conviction and sentence had to proceed. The issue was not only what he had done, but what the defense had failed to uncover and present about his condition. In recounting the event alongside the history of abuse, illness, and homelessness, the book shows how a decisive punishment followed a trial that had not brought that history into view.