After 20+ years on death row, SC man convicted in murder-for-hire to be resentenced
A South Carolina death row inmate convicted in a murder-for-pay plot will be resentenced after a federal court found Thursday that his previous attorneys failed to present evidence that could have helped him during his original sentencing.
In his opinion, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote that Sammie Louis Stokes’ attorney had evidence about Stokes’ troubled past but decided to withhold it ahead of Stokes’ original sentencing. Stokes was sentenced to death in 1999 and has spent the past two decades on South Carolina’s death row.
“The jury returned a death sentence without hearing a word from the defense about Stokes as an individual,” Gregory wrote.
A second attorney assigned to Stokes for his post-conviction hearings found more information about Stokes’ “traumatic upbringing” but failed to try to use it to mitigate the sentence against Stokes, Gregory wrote.
“On the merits, we find that trial counsel’s failure to adequately investigate and present personal evidence was objectively unreasonable and prejudicial,” Gregory wrote.
In Gregory’s opinion, a panel of federal appeals judges described physical and sexual abuse that Stokes suffered at a young age. Both of his parents were “serious alcoholics,” Gregory wrote, and Stokes and his sister were brought to bars alongside their mother. Stokes and his sister would skip school to steal food from the neighbors so they would have something to eat.
Stokes saw both of his parents die in front of him before he turned 14, the judges wrote. Stokes began using alcohol and drugs and dropped out of the school with only a ninth-grade education level.
“According to the child development expert retained by Stokes’s federal counsel, these facts amount to an extraordinarily traumatic childhood that impaired Stokes’s future emotional regulation and social adaptation,” Gregory wrote.
Stokes was convicted of murdering 21-year-old Connie Snipes in Orangeburg County, according to court documents. He was hired in 1998 by Snipes’ mother-in-law, who paid him $2,000 to murder Snipes so she could have custody of her grandchildren.
A jury found that Stokes raped, mutilated and murdered Snipes in 1999. A jury spent three and a half hours deliberating whether to give him the death penalty, the Orangeburg Times and Democrat reported at the time.
It is unclear when Stokes’ resentencing hearing will take place. Federal judges ruled that it must take place “within a reasonable time.”
One judge, Judge Marvin Quattlebaum, issued a dissenting opinion, saying he did not believe the attorneys provided ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing phase of Stokes’ trial.
