The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, "Brian Nichols avoids death sentence."
Brian Nichols will at most spend the rest of his life in prison, spared a death sentence by hopelessly deadlocked Fulton County jurors who had convicted him for the March 11, 2005, courthouse shootings.
Judge James Bodiford said he would decide Saturday whether Nichols would get life or life with no possibility of parole.
The panel’s 9-3 vote split, with the majority in favor of Nichols dying by injection for killing four people in the rampage that terrorized Atlanta, shook Georgia’s judicial system, cost taxpayers millions of dollars and left the death penalty in doubt in Fulton County.
It was not known if the three holdouts included any of the three jurors who indicated before they were chosen for the case that they had misgivings about the death penalty. None of the jurors would talk publicly before leaving the courthouse.
Jurors wrestled with the punishment issue for three days, saying they were locked Thursday in the death-penalty impasse. Bodiford gave them two extra hours Friday night for a last-ditch effort to reach the unanimity Georgia law requires for a death sentence.
Nichols, who turned 37 on Wednesday, sagged in the shoulders as he heard of the continued deadlock that foreshadowed his escape from execution. Wearing a dark pin-striped suit and cobaltblue shirt, the former $80,000-a-year UNIX administrator for United Parcel Service sat expressionless, as he has for most of the 56 days of the trial, his only hint of nervousness an eye that blinked repeatedly.
His nemesis, District Attorney Paul Howard, sat grimly in the courtroom audience, sighed and stared stonily ahead as victims’ relatives wept quietly behind him. It was Howard who reportedly declined a year ago to let Nichols plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence without parole.
Howard declined to comment Friday night but said he’d talk Saturday about the possibility of seeking revision of Georgia law that requires a unanimous jury for a death penalty.
The jury’s verdict showed again how hard is to get a death penalty in Fulton County. Howard has sought the death penalty at least 10 times before juries, which so far have sentenced only two people to death: one in 2000 for the unprovoked killing of a police officer and the other last July for a triple murder, including a 3-year-old boy.
Georgia law requires death sentences to be proportional to penalties given for similar murders, according to Michael Mears, a professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, who defended death-penalty cases for years.
“If Brian Nichols does not receive the death penalty, how is the Georgia Supreme Court going to allow any other death penalty to stand that involves the murder of a police officer or court official?” Mears asked. “It is not the fault of the prosecutor. He is asking for the death penalty. He just can’t get the jury to agree with him.”
Earlier coverage begins with this post.
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