Testimony about a convicted murderer’s rough childhood — which included watching his father slit the throats of two beloved pets — likely would not have stopped a jury from sentencing him to die, a federal appeals court said Wednesday as it reinstated the death penalty.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal judge’s decision, reinstating the death sentence for Jason McGehee, 33. Jeff Rosenzweig, an attorney for McGehee, said he was disappointed and that he will request a hearing from the full 8th Circuit.
McGehee was convicted along with two others in the 1996 death of 15-year-old John Melbourne Jr. Prosecutors argued that the trio kidnapped, tortured and killed the teen because he told police about their involvement in a theft.
A federal judge last year threw out McGehee’s death sentence, saying the trial judge should have allowed evidence during sentencing that McGehee had a violent childhood.
According to court documents, jurors weren’t allowed to hear evidence that McGehee’s mother made him sleep outside for days without access to food or a bathroom, that his father slit the throats of two pet dogs, and that his stepfather kicked McGehee’s dog, Dusty, and made McGehee watch the animal suffer and die.
McGehee’s attorney had tried to present that testimony as mitigating evidence as jurors considered whether McGehee should be executed or spend life in prison.
“The death of a pet can be a traumatic experience for a child, and the story of parental cruelty may have contributed to the picture of family dysfunction,” the 8th Circuit’s opinion said. “But to the extent that the testimony was offered to show a pattern of physical violence, it was contradicted by other evidence. McGehee’s grandmother testified that McGehee was not physically abused or neglected as a child.”
According to prosecutors, McGehee was the leader of a group of friends who lived together in a house in Harrison and survived by cashing stolen and forged checks. On Aug. 19, 1996, he sent Melbourne, the youngest of the group, into Harrison to cash a stolen check, but the boy attracted suspicion and was taken into questioning by police. Authorities say Melbourne told officers about stolen property at the house and police released him into his father’s custody.
The three men later lured the boy to the house and beat him, then bound his hands and took him to an abandoned house in Omaha, Ark., where they beat him again, cut him and burned him, according to prosecutors. McGehee and two others took turns strangling him until he died, prosecutors said.
The other two men were sentenced to life in prison without parole — and jurors weren’t allowed to hear that as they considered McGehee’s sentence, an issue that the 8th Circuit upheld Wednesday.
“The evidence at trial showed that McGehee was the ringleader of a torture murder and that his younger, weaker victim was brutalized because he told the truth when confronted by police,” the 8th Circuit’s opinion said. “McGehee inflicted most of the blows during the several hours in which Melbourne was tortured, and he exhibited no hesitation or remorse, apparently laughing just after he had left Melbourne’s naked body lying in the woods.”