SC death row inmate convicted in murder-for-hire plot may lose chance for new sentence
A South Carolina death row inmate’s chances to receive a new sentence may be in jeopardy after a U.S. appeals court agreed to hear the state Attorney General’s request to reconsider the issue, according to court filings.
After a panel of three appellate judges issued an opinion granting Sammie Stokes — convicted in a murder for hire scheme — a new sentencing hearing, S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson petitioned to have all 15 of the 4th circuit appellate judges consider whether Stokes should have a chance to receive a new sentence.
The court ruled that as they consider holding a new hearing, the court will hold off on the original resentencing hearing.
The decision came down Wednesday, almost two weeks after two of the three justices on a panel ordered that Stokes get a new sentence because his previous attorneys failed to present evidence that may have helped him during his original sentencing hearing. One judge, Judge Marvin Quattlebaum, issued a dissenting opinion, saying he did not believe the attorneys provided were ineffective assistance of counsel during the Stokes’ sentencing phase of Stokes’ trial.
“Although the decisions were quintessentially strategic and informed by a thorough investigation, the majority determines that they amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel. I disagree,” Quattlebaum wrote. “These decisions, according to our precedent, merit our highest deference.”
In the majority opinion, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote that Stokes’ attorneys had information about their client’s troubled childhood, but decided to withhold it.
In their opinion, Gregory wrote that Stokes experienced both physical and sexual abuse at a young age. Both of his parents were “serious alcoholics,” and Stokes and his sister would also skip school to steal something to eat from neighbors.
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 sentenced to death in 1999 and has spent the past two decades on South Carolina’s death row. He was convicted of murdering 21-year-old Connie Snipes in Orangeburg County after 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, according to court documents.
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.
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 10:33 AM.
