Herbert Richardson's bombing

Herbert Richardson’s bombing began as a disastrously misguided plan to win back a former girlfriend and ended with the death of a child who had trusted him. A bomb he placed on her porch in Dothan, Alabama, exploded when her ten-year-old niece picked it up, killing her instantly and traumatizing a twelve-year-old friend. The case then exposed a second danger: how an unintended death could be transformed into a capital prosecution through an unprecedented legal theory, racially charged argument, and a defense too underfunded and unprepared to tell the jury who Richardson was.

The plan and the explosion

After serving in Vietnam, Richardson had slowly begun to recover at a veterans hospital in New York City. A nurse from Dothan cared for him there, and her compassion made him feel hopeful and alive. When she returned to Alabama, he followed. They briefly became intimate, and Richardson wanted to marry her. But his intense protectiveness became an obsessive need; after repeated efforts to separate from him, she insisted he stay away. Richardson moved closer to her home instead, convinced that she was merely confused and would eventually return.

Richardson was intelligent, with a particular talent for electronics and mechanics, and he had a generous side. Children in the neighborhood visited him, ran errands for him, and sometimes ate food he prepared. Yet his fixation and judgment were increasingly distorted. He had lost his mother when he was three, struggled with drugs and alcohol before enlisting, and returned from war carrying further trauma. Rather than recognize his former girlfriend’s refusal, he devised a plan that treated her fear as a problem he could solve: if she felt threatened, he believed, she would turn to him for protection.

He assembled a small bomb and placed it on her front porch, intending to set it off, rush to her aid, and become her rescuer. The scheme was reckless even by the standards of combat, and especially dangerous in a poor Black neighborhood. One morning, the girlfriend’s niece and another girl came out and saw the strange package. The ten-year-old picked up the bag, which had a clock attached, and shook it to see whether it would tick. The device detonated. She died immediately; her twelve-year-old friend, standing beside her, was traumatized.

The girls were not strangers to Richardson. They had come by his house for breakfast, as children often did, and he had welcomed them into his yard. From across the street, he watched the house. When the bomb went off, he ran toward it as he had intended to do, but arrived among neighbors grieving a child he knew. The intended rescue became an immediate encounter with the consequences of his plan.

From a fatal mistake to a capital case

The police soon found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Richardson’s car and front yard. The prosecution treated the bombing not simply as a reckless act that had killed a child, but as evidence of evil deserving death. Richardson was an outsider in Dothan, a Northerner, and the bomb presented a different kind of threat from what officials considered ordinary domestic violence. The county was 28 percent Black, yet the prosecutor struck every Black prospective juror. In closing argument to the all-white jury, the prosecutor said Richardson was “associated with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy.

The central legal difficulty was intent. Alabama’s capital statute required an intentional murder for a death to qualify for the death penalty, but Richardson had not intended to kill the child—or anyone else. The State relied on an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the killing capital murder. Richardson had initially been advised to deny culpability; ultimately, he argued that the bombing constituted reckless murder, punishable by life imprisonment but not by death. That distinction was the case’s decisive legal hinge: the bomb’s lethal consequence was undeniable, but the required intent to kill was not.

A defense that left the history untold

The appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Richardson’s background, military service, war trauma, relationship with the victim, or obsession with his former girlfriend. The omission was consequential: the jury heard none of the history that might have distinguished a reckless, deluded plan from an intention to murder. Alabama limited appointed lawyers’ compensation for out-of-court preparation to $1,000, and the lawyer spent almost no time preparing. The trial lasted just over a day; the judge swiftly sentenced Richardson to death.

The failures continued after sentencing. The appointed lawyer told Richardson that he saw no reason to appeal because the trial had been as fair as Richardson could expect. Richardson pointed out that he had been sentenced to death and wanted to appeal despite the poor prospects. His lawyer filed no brief. The case therefore joined a capital verdict built on an expansive theory of intent to a defense that had neither investigated the circumstances nor pursued the appeal Richardson requested.

The case in a wider pattern

Richardson’s prosecution sits beside other cases in which poverty, vulnerability, and inadequate representation shaped what a criminal court was able—or willing—to see. In Chester, Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Trina Garnett grew up amid severe poverty and abuse; after two boys died in a house fire, her lawyer failed to seek an incompetency determination or challenge her trial as an adult. She was convicted of second-degree murder and received mandatory life without parole, although the judge found she had no intent to kill. Her case differs in its facts and sentence, but likewise shows how a child’s circumstances could disappear behind the formal category of a crime.

The same contrast matters in prosecutions involving the deaths of infants. Marsha Colbey was charged with capital murder after delivering a stillborn son, and the State pursued the case despite serious questions about the forensic basis for claiming the child had been born alive. The book also describes Victoria Banks, an intellectually disabled Black woman who pleaded guilty under pressure to killing a child who had never existed. These cases are not equivalent to Richardson’s bombing; together, however, they show how the label attached to a death, the quality of forensic or legal scrutiny, and the defendant’s access to a meaningful defense could determine the punishment sought. In Richardson’s case, the child’s death was real and devastating. The unresolved question was whether the law could convert that consequence, without proof of intent to kill, into a sentence of death.