BOSTON (AP) – A lawyer for a man who could face the death penalty for carjacking and killing two Massachusetts men told jurors Wednesday that his brain “has been broken for a very long time,” but a prosecutor insisted his brain was his “most powerful tool” in the killings.
The contrast was drawn during opening statements in the sentencing retrial of Gary Lee Sampson, a drifter who pleaded guilty in the carjack killings and the strangulation of a third man in New Hampshire during a weeklong crime rampage in 2001.
Sampson was sentenced to death in 2003, but a federal judge granted him a new sentencing trial in 2011 after finding that one of the jurors at his first trial had lied about her background.
Sampson’s lawyer, William McDaniels, urged the jury at his retrial to spare Sampson’s life and instead sentence him to life in prison. He said Sampson has struggled with traumatic brain injury since the age of 4, when he fell down a flight of stairs, and has received at least a dozen head injuries during his life.
“There’s no excuse or justification that Gary Sampson offers for the loss of these valued human beings – these were terrible crimes. There nevertheless is a context of how he came to be where he was in the last week of July 2001,” McDaniels said.