SC Supreme Court questions fairness of child killer Tim Jones’ death penalty trial

South Carolina’s Supreme Court justices wondered aloud Tuesday, at times seemingly annoyed, at how the prosecution and judges conducted the 2019 death penalty trial of Tim Jones Jr., convicted of murdering his five children in 2014.

In an hour and seven-minute hearing, the five justices bore in on fundamental questions of fairness in one of South Carolina’s most highly publicized death penalty trials in recent years

They asked whether prosecutors should have showed jurors gruesome autopsy photographs of Jones’ slain children, and whether trial Judge Eugune “Bubba” Griffith was right to exclude a defense expert witness whose testimony challenged the prosecution’s view and might have spared Jones the death penalty.

“I can’t imagine an expert is not entitled to speak on the procedure and method used by the opposing expert. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of that,” associate Judge John Cannon Few told Senior Assistant Deputy Attorney General Melody J. Brown.

Few continued, “You say they have nothing of substance. That absolutely makes no sense to me. She is addressing the methodology used by the opposing expert. That is of substance.”

Brown replied the defense expert witness would not have testified to “anything to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.” Few interrupted and said, “That’s for the jury.”

Chief Appellate Defender Robert Dudek told the justices that Jones is not only seeking to overturn just his death penalty but he wants a completely new trial.

In June 2019, a Lexington County jury deliberated six hours and 15 minutes before finding Jones guilty of murdering his five children, ages 1-8, at the family’s Lexington County Red Bank mobile home in August 2014.

Jones chose not to testify, exercising his constitutional right to remain silent. However, the jury heard taped confessions of him admitting to killing his children.

Jurors chose from four options — guilty, not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity and guilty but mentally ill. Jones pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity as his defense team claimed he had schizophrenia and could not distinguish right from wrong at the time of the killings.

Before Jones’ trial, his lawyers filed repeated motions saying that Jones would plead guilty in return for a sentence of life without parole. But 11th Circuit Solicitor Rick Hubbard explained after the trial why he rejected that alternative.

“If this wasn’t the case for the death penalty, we don’t need a death penalty,” Hubbard told reporters.

A jury later sentenced Jones to death, a decision the jury of seven men and five women made in one hour and 50 minutes.

Justices question precedent, photos of children

In court Tuesday, justices said court precedents generally give latitude to defense efforts to mitigate, or substitute a life sentence, for the death penalty.

Associate Justice John Kittredge noted that, year after year, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that “mitigation evidence in a capital sentencing proceeding is broad and expansive. That’s not what happened here.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Brown said. “There is Supreme Court precedent that says there is a broad path. But it is not unlimited.”

Justices also questioned the motives of prosecutors giving photographs to the jury that showed the advanced decomposition of Jones’ five children — Merah, 8; Elias, 7; Nahtahn, 6; Gabriel, 2; and Abigail Elaine, 1.

“It sounds to me like you’re not wanting to present them for probative (proof) value,” Few said. “You’re wanting to present them for the extent to which they unfairly prejudice the jury.”

Hubbard, who prosecuted the case and also argued the state’s case with Brown Tuesday, said the photographs were given to the jury to prove Jones’ intent to commit a horrible crime.

Jones had driven around the Southeast for days allowing the bodies to decompose and also bought acid to destroy the bodies, which, in effect, destroyed evidence, Hubbard said.

“I’m letting them (jurors) determine how they come to those photographs, but it is within the confines of the circumstances of the crime and the character of the defendant,” Hubbard said. “His children were now evidence, and he was seeking to destroy them.”

Justices, including Chief Justice Don Beatty, asked Hubbard why he put the photos of the children’s bodies in an envelope to let the jury look at them in the jury room rather than show them in open court.

Hubbard said that by not displaying the photos in open court, he was showing respect for the jury. In several decades of presenting photos of deceased victims to jurors, Hubbard said he has seen how shocked jurors can be, and he decided to spare them by giving the choice to look at the photos in the privacy of the jury room.

“If they didn’t want to reach those photographs ... they didn’t have to,” Hubbard said. “If they felt like they had enough evidence, they could stop.”

In Jones’ sentencing hearing in 2019, Hubbard in his jury arguments portrayed Jones as a selfish, cunning man with a warped view of Christianity who quoted Scripture to bully his children, then brutalized them and deliberately strangled them.

“Is there any crime more horrible than what you have heard about when you came into the courtroom?” Hubbard asked the jury, calling Jones a “monster” and stressing that the death penalty is fitting because it is reserved for “the worst of the worst.”

Jones, 39, is now on South Carolina’s death row.

There is no timeline for when the court will issue a ruling.

Should the state’s high court reverse Jones’ sentence, it would not be the first time justices have done so.

Over the years, justices have reversed convictions and verdicts of dozens of such cases on issues involving what evidence and witnesses can be presented to the jury. The U.S. Supreme Court has also reversed numerous death verdicts and sentences.

This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 12:42 PM.