A death row inmate represented at trial by an attorney who abused drugs and alcohol and another lawyer with no capital case experience has been granted a new sentencing hearing based on his claim of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” The Tennessee Supreme Court allowed state prosecutors and inmate David Allen Brimmer to withdraw their appeals, sending the case back to the Anderson County Criminal Court for resentencing.
In a 1998 opinion, the state Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Brimmer’s conviction for the murder of Rodney Compton, whose body was discovered in a rural Loudon County hayfield. The court also ordered a new sentencing hearing because Brimmer’s attorney was ineffective during the sentencing phase of his 1991 trial.
The Court of Criminal Appeals said in its opinion there was proof that one of the attorneys “regularly abused alcohol during the time he represented” Brimmer. The second attorney, appointed two months prior to the trial, testified that co-counsel “would arrive at early morning meetings with a six-pack of beer.” He also said the attorney acknowledged consuming “a lot of alcohol and cocaine.” The second attorney had been practicing law for three years and had completed three criminal trials, none of them capital cases.
The two attorneys were deficient in their presentation of expert testimony concerning the relationship between Brimmer’s mental and emotional disorders and the commission of the crime, the Court of Criminal Appeals concluded. A psychologist testified at a post-conviction hearing that there was a connection between Brimmer’s mental disorders and his crimes.
“This testimony would have been presented in relation to the statutory mitigators during the sentencing phase of the trial had the proper questions been presented by defense counsel,” the Court of Criminal Appeals wrote. “... Due to his counsel’s errors in this case, instructions permitting the jury to consider that the defendant suffered from a mental disease or that the murder was committed while the defendant was under extreme mental disturbance were rejected.”