Avery Jenkins’s post-conviction hearing and new trial

Avery Jenkins’s post-conviction hearing challenged a death sentence imposed after a trial that had not investigated his history or presented evidence of his profound mental illness. Over three days, experts and other witnesses described the disabilities and failed foster-care placements that shaped his life, arguing that they mattered to both his culpability and his sentence. The case ended with a new trial and Jenkins’s removal from death row to a facility where he could receive mental-health treatment.

Background and the Original Trial

Jenkins’s history included severe abuse and repeated institutional failure. As a child, he was locked in a closet, denied food, and beaten by foster parents. When he was ten, his foster mother tied him to a tree in the woods and left him; hunters found him three days later in very poor health. His difficulties continued through adolescence: he began abusing drugs and alcohol, experienced seizures and psychotic episodes, and was eventually left homeless.

At twenty, during a psychotic episode, Jenkins entered a stranger’s house believing demons were attacking him and stabbed a man to death. His lawyers had not investigated his history before trial. He was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The post-conviction case therefore concerned not whether the killing had occurred, but what the trial had failed to learn about the person who committed it and how that omission affected the judgment of his culpability.

Building the Post-Conviction Case

Before the hearing, Bryan Stevenson repeatedly tried to bring Jenkins a milkshake, which the prison would not permit. At the beginning of each visit, Jenkins asked whether Stevenson had brought one; Stevenson promised to keep trying, using the familiar exchange to help him focus on something else. The ritual continued into the hearing preparations. At the courthouse, Stevenson visited Jenkins in a basement holding cell and tried to explain what would happen, including that former foster-care witnesses might upset him and that experts would speak directly about his disabilities and illness. Jenkins remained pleasant and agreeable.

The legal argument centered on the failure of Jenkins’s trial attorneys to uncover his history or present his disabilities as relevant to his criminal responsibility and punishment. Over three days, the defense introduced expert testimony about organic brain damage, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, and how those conditions could combine to produce severe mental impairment. The experts explained that psychosis could contribute to dangerous behavior, while distinguishing behavior arising from serious illness from a judgment about Jenkins’s character.

The hearing also examined the foster-care system that had failed him. Witnesses described his passage from one unhappy placement to another, and the record included that several of his former foster parents were later convicted of sexual abuse and criminal mismanagement of foster children. Some former foster parents acknowledged that they had been frustrated by Jenkins and unequipped to manage his serious mental-health problems. His homelessness and drug addiction were presented as part of that history, not as isolated facts detached from the care he had received.

Disability, Accountability, and Sentencing

Stevenson argued that ignoring mental disability at trial was comparable to demanding that someone who had lost his legs climb stairs without assistance, or that a blind person cross a busy highway unaided, and then treating failure as laziness or cowardice. The comparison made the hearing’s central distinction concrete: physical disabilities are often recognized as requiring accommodation, while mental disabilities, less visible to others, are more readily dismissed and their effects mistaken for personal failings.

The argument did not deny the gravity of the murder. Stevenson acknowledged that the state had to hold Jenkins accountable and protect the public. His claim was that accountability could not be fair if the court disregarded disability when deciding the degree of culpability and the appropriate sentence. The hearing thus put two propositions together rather than choosing between them: the violence required a response, and Jenkins’s profound impairment and history were essential to judging what that response should be.

Outcome and Significance

Stevenson left the hearing feeling encouraged, while recognizing that state post-conviction hearings rarely produced favorable rulings and that relief might instead come on appeal. About a month later, before judgment had been issued, he returned to the prison because he wanted to check on Jenkins after the hearing. Jenkins had seemed composed for much of the proceeding but became visibly upset when former foster parents entered the courtroom.

At the next visit, Stevenson began their familiar exchange by explaining that the prison had again prevented him from bringing a chocolate milkshake. Jenkins interrupted to say that he had already gotten one and was all right. They then discussed the hearing for an hour. Jenkins never asked Stevenson for a milkshake again. He won a new trial and was ultimately taken off death row and placed in a facility where he could receive mental-health treatment. The repeated request, and its disappearance, marks a small but concrete change within the case: the hearing had made room for Jenkins’s history and needs to be seen, and its outcome moved him from a death sentence toward treatment.