A death penalty murder trial is vengeance fancied up to make it seem fair and reasonable. In reality it is a tragedy for everyone involved. A tragedy tor the defendant whose life is forfeit over an act of horrific violence, for the victim whose life has been taken, for the victim’s family who will grieve his loss, and even for the family of the defendant who will be scarred just as deeply. A tragedy even for the lawyers who are appointed to represent the defendant. Their lives and careers will be indelibly changed. The only comfort comes from knowing, as with all things, some good will always come from it. It hard for me to write about my first death penalty murder trial so I will choose to write about the good I felt came from it.
You need to know the hard, cold facts of the senseless violence that gave rise to the trial. It was the night of June 18, 1980 when three men drove from Sumter to Charleston to sell guns they’d stolen in a gun store burglary. Not even the fence they tried to sell the guns to liked their looks and threw them out of his nightclub. Black hearted and empty handed, the three men headed back to Sumter. Wesley Copeland was driving and pulled into a North Charleston gas station. He went inside and robbed the station of just over $4,000.00. He took the two attendants, Bill Spain and Kenneth Krause, with them to a dirt road in Berkeley County alongside the railroad tracks. He made both men kneel in the dirt road before cold bloodedly shooting them in the backs of their heads. Continuing the drive back to Sumter, Copeland began worrying the two men with him, Danny Ray Coker and Sammy Roberts, would turn on him. He insisted they rob a second gas station and murder the attendant to prove their loyalty. They robbed the only all-night gas station in Moncks Corner, took the attendant, William Coakley, out to a secluded spot, and shot him in back four times with 44 wad cutters as he tried to flee.
The murders went unsolved until, four months later, Danny Ray Coker was caught committing another burglary. Facing fifteen years to life for the burglary, Danny Ray plea bargained for immunity on the murders in exchange for testifying against Copeland and Roberts. The Solicitor announced their arrests and his intent to seek the death penalty. The first good thing to come out of the case weas Peter D. Deluca, Jr. being appointedf to represent Roberts. Pete and I would become lifelong friends. It was week before Thanksgiving 1980.
We got our first inkling we were being appointed sacrificial props to lend an appearance of fairness when the trial was set for January 7, 1980. That gave Pete and I just seven weeks to prepare for a death penalty trial, with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s falling in between.
Adding to the impossible task already ahead of us, before Sammy was arrested, he was shot driving down a highway in Sumter. Someone pulled alongside, stuck a shotgun out the window, and blew half of Sammy’s face off. His jaw was wired shut and his head wrapped in layers of cotton gauze and bandages. He made muffled hissing noises sucking dripping spit back in between his missing teeth. His voice was so garbled it was almost incomprehensible. And, he had unimaginable bad breath.
Even though it was our first death penalty cases, we knew enough to immediately file a motion for continuance. Our suspicions as to our roles were confirmed when our motion was summarily denied.
The second good thing to come out of our appointment was our meeting David Bruck, a nationally recognized death penalty opponent, who came to share his knowledge and experience concerning death penalty trials. He spent an entire day giving us a crash course in all the ways a death penalty case is unlike any other. We were left overwhelmed by how much we didn’t know but without his help we wouldn’t have even known where to start.
A death penalty trial is really two back-to-back trials before the same jury. One to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, the other to determine life or death. Lawyers appointed to represent a death penalty defendant are put in an untenable position by first, having to argue the defendant is not guilty of the murders, then, having lost all credibility when he’s convicted, having to ask the same jury for mercy. David Bruck recommended one of us take on the guilt or innocence phase and the other take on the sentencing phase to maintain a semblance of credibility. Pete took responsibility for the guilt or innocence phase, and I took responsibility for the sentencing phase.
Pete always carried his share of the burden and always stood ready to take on more. I think trying a death penalty case with another lawyer must be like going into battle. Soldiers, I am told, develop a special bond with the soldiers who fight alongside them and have their backs. Pete had my back and I knew I depended on him to have my back. Although, I don’t think we ever had another case together after the trial, every time I would run into him, in a courthouse or at a bar or social function, it was always like running into a long-lost brother.
David Bruck made a career helping other lawyers appointed in death penalty cases. Pete, like me, didn’t have a choice about being appointed. But, the third good thing to come out of the ordeal was the unexpected help received from others who offered it just out of the goodness of their hearts. The statute Pete and I were appointed under provided only $2,500.00 to pay for costs. Oh sure, we could have filed a motion and waited for a hearing to request more, but we didn’t have time for that. Based on the judge’s unreasonable denial of a continuance, we had little reason to think he’d be inclined to help us. David Bruck said we’d need that $2,500.00 to pay for a forensic psychologist to offer mitigating evidence at the sentencing phase. That left Pete and I with no money to hire a private investigator. Fortunately, a private investigator I’d been working with on my other cases turned out to be a death penalty opponent and he volunteered his desperately needed services for free.
We needed a PI because our client claimed an alibi defense. He claimed he was in a motor vehicle accident in Sumter with, of all people, the mayor’s wife, late the afternoon of the murders and couldn’t possibly have been in Charleston meeting with the fence like the snitch said in his statement. Sure enough, Sammy was involved in the accident but that wasn’t good enough. There’s an old lawyer saying, you live or die by your alibi, so we had to make the trip to prove he couldn’t have been in Charleston selling guns like the snitch said. The police report gave us the time the accident was cleared and our investigator timed the trip to Charleston. As we suspected and the PI determined, it was entirely possible to have made the trip with time to spare driving the speed limit all the way. Worse, the investigator realized the accident happened as Sammy pulled out from a gun store parking lot. When the investigator checked inside the gun store, he learned Sammy’s sister had purchased a box 44 wad cutter bullets, the same bullets used to kill Mr. Coakley.
The investigator was nothing if not thorough. He also read where the snitch said they stopped at a grocery store in Goose Creek on their way to Charleston. He drove by the store timing the trip and noticed the times on the front door said the store was closed when the snitch said they stopped there. When he later went back to verify the closing time, the manager told him they were doing inventory the night of the murders and he specifically remembered the three scary looking men banging on the front doors he refused to let in.
That was pretty much how our investigation into the murders went. Our client said he was with his girlfriend the night of the murders but the PI couldn’t find one shred of corroborating evidence. Not one person who saw them or talked to them that night. Although we keep coming up empty, we didn’t leave any stone unturned. We visited all of the crime scenes, interviewed the medical examiner who performed the autopsies, talked to all the investigating officers who would talk to us, and reviewed boxes of reports, photographs, diagrams, and other records produced by the prosecution. Nothing ever hinted at a defense.
Fortunately, we had some luck when it came to investigating mitigation evidence, or so we thought. Sammy’s entire life was inexorably entwined with violence. His father abused alcohol and his family in equal measure. He taught Sammy violence by beating it into him. Sammy had to fight his entire life, in and out of prison, but could never escape it. He was very close to his brother who was shot in the head and died bleeding out in Sammy’s arms. Half of Sammy’s face being blown off was a graphic illustration of the toll violence had taken on him. With David Bruck’s help we thought we’d hired a competent forensic psychologist to pull it all together for us. The problem was the psycholoigist was stretched as thin as we were, he was hard to get ahold of, and, when we did get ahold of him, all he would say is he was still conducting his evaluation. All we could do is trust the recommendation and hope he’d finish in time for the trial.
While the Solicitor had a suite of offices in the courthouse, I lived in Charleston adding an hour and a half commute each way every day. Pete’s office was a good thirty minutes away in Goose Creek. We finally caught a break and prevailed upon the judge to give us a room in the courthouse to use as a base of operations during the trial.
Time inexorably ran out and Pete and I were looking at drawing a jury. We tried researching the jury pool but that proved discouraging. Everybody knew and loved Mr. Coakley worked for the only black fuineral home and ran the only all-night gas station in Moncks Corner. He was knbown by everybody and helped many people in need. There was a drum beat of media coverage, none of it favorable, and the drum beat was ramping up as the trial approached.
We knew trying to find jurors who weren’t prejudiced against the defendants was going to be near impossible but, on top of that, any juror selected for the trial had to be death penalty qualified. That meant they would have to be willing to impose the death penalty. Any potential juror opposed to capital punishment on religious grounds, “judge not, lest ye be judged,” would be excused. We decided to try and exclude jurors who would always impose the death penalty, “an eye for an eye,” and wasted untold hours drafting questions to identify jurors who, having convicted the defendant of the intentional killing of another, with malice aforethought, would always vote to impose the death penalty.
Monday morning arrived and first thing we were told the clerk intended to use a cute little girl, all dressed up in her Sunday best with a pretty bow in her hair, draw the names of prospective jurors from the box. I don’t know why, but it offended my sensibilities and tried to speak with the judge about it. Even though the judge acknowledged the statute called for a blindman to pick the jurors, he became upset with me and simply said the clerk didn’t have a blind man handy, so, what did I want, to delay jury selection until one could be found? Pete, always the more sensible and levelheaded of the two of us, took me aside and convinced me to just let it go.
A hundred names were drawn from the box and the jury selection process began that afternoon. Although the statute said the accused had the right to question prospective jurors, the way the statute was interpreted at that time was the judge would ask the questions. The first thing the judge did was inform us he had no intention of asking the questions we spent all that time drafting. He dismissed our questions as being duplicative to those he was already going to ask himself. Anybody who’s ever watched a courtroom drama on tv, except for the judge, knows leading questions that suggest the desired answer are never allowed. The first thing the judge told the first potential juror was they had taken an oath to follow the law as he gave it to them. Once they agreed they would do that, he asked, if I told you the law says you have to consider imposing a life sentence, would you do that? I jumped to my feet to object so fast I scraped my knuckles on the veneer of the defense table. From the look on the judge’s face you’d have thought I’d hurled an insult at him. His face turned as red as my bleeding knuckles. The judge was so upset he called a recess. I later learned from one of the bailiffs he’d called Chief Justice Julius Ness to complain that I had objected to his questioning of a juror. I don’t know what they discussed but Judge Ness calmed him down and, between the two of them, they came up with a less obvious way to death qualify the jury. After that dustup, the judge breezed right through jury selection excluding all death penalty opponents and qualifying all death penalty enthusiasts over our continuing objections, duly noted and denied.
Reading this you may think you can imagine just how bad the rest of the guilt or innocence phase of the trial went, but you wouldn’t come close. Imagine, if you can, Pete and I having to sit squished up together at one end of counsel table trying to escape the stench of Sammy’s breath. It was almost torture every time Sammy had something he wanted to tell us. Pete was sitting second chair and bore the brunt of Sammy’s horrible breath as Sammy leaned in to say something. If the stench was bad enough, you couldn’t understand what he was saying, so he’d have to repeat everything once or twice. And, imagine a couple of days into the trial, Pete and I were summoned into the judge’s chambers. He was furious and reamed us out because one of Sammy’s sisters had thrown a used tampon into the corner of the room we’d been allowed to use. For some unknown reason the judge somehow felt Pete and I were responsible to failing to control our client’s family. We fought back to keep the room but Sammy’s family were barred from using it after that.
Peter Them was appointed to represent Wesley Copeland and, let me just say, his courtroom style was unorthodox. At one point, he was questioning the investigating officer who accompanied us to the scene of Mr. Coakley’s murder. He asked the officer if he remembered being asked to walk off the distance from the edge of the road to where the Mr. Coakley lay shot on the ground. The officer said he did. Peter then asked and how many steps that was and the officer replied, I don’t know, I thought you wrote it down. The jury got a good laugh but their finding defense counsel comical was not helpful. Then, there was the complete disaster of Sammy’s alibiing girlfriend admitting on cross examination she’d lie to save Sammy. It was crash and burn at every turn.
Just to be clear, because Sammy could have committed the murders, didn’t prove he did. He maintained his innocence throughout the trial and we were obligated to do everything we could to prove his defense. It is worth remembering, aside from the testimony of the snitch, the only physical evidence tying Sammy to the murders was a single photograph of a single footprint of Sammy’s sneaker found at the scene of the first murders. It was the snitch who conveniently alerted the police to where they could find Sammy’s sneakers. Pete and I realized Sammy and Danny Ray, were roommates and both wore the same a size 10 and ½ shoes. At least there weren’t any other pictures when the State rested its case. There weren’t until the next morning when the ever-accommodating judge allowed the Solicitor to reopen his case to introduce a whole new batch of crime scene photographs. They were taken by a photographer for the Berkeley County weekly newspaper. The Solicitor claimed he had just learned about them. Never mind, none of the new photographs had been produced in discovery, the photographer for the local paper had obviously been given unfettered access to the crime scene. We objected but, of course, the judge denied our objection ruling instead he would give us a few minutes to review the new photographs before letting them in. Our review didn’t take long before we found several new photographs showing two sets of size 10 and ½ shoe prints at the murder scenes. I have often wondered if the Solicitor knew just how close he came to resting his case with a big hole in his proof that could have set Sammy free.
Poor Pete had very little left to argue in his summation at the conclusion of the guilt or innocence phase of the trial. He argued the unreliability of the snitch’s testimony. He questioned what the snitch had been offered in exchange for immunity on his three murders, two admitted armed robberies, and three kidnappings. The Solicitor simply scoffed at his argument and claimed, with a straight face, that no deal had been made and the snitch could get up to life in prison for the burglary. It wouldn’t be until after the trial that the truth would become known and the snitch was given the minimum sentence of fifteen years, eligible for parole in five. I don’t know if knowing the true nature of the deal would have made any difference in the outcome of our case, but I refuse to believe such a lenient sentence would have been given without the Solicitor’s blessing. The guilty verdict in the guilty or innocence phase of our trial came quickly. We were given a little more than a weekend to prepare for the sentencing phase of the trial set to begin the following week.
Our problem was our death penalty forensic psychologist was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t answer our calls. Out of desperation, we sent our private investigator to track him down and serve a subpoena on him to appear in court Monday morning but when Monday morning came around, the expert was nowhere to be found. I stalled for time which the judge begrudgingly granted while making sure the jury knew the delay was because we weren’t prepared. With the judge’s patience running out, the expert finally arrived. He had both a typed and handwritten report with him. When I tried comparing the two, they appeared to be the same. I called him to the stand and walked him through Sammy’s life of violence. When I thought he’d finished and I turned to asking him his opinions, the so-called expert interrupted me and said, wait there’s one more thing. Not knowing what that one thing the psychologist thought was so important, I should have cut him off and moved on but then the jury would have been left wondering what I was hiding. So I was forced to let the expert tell the jury what it was. He said Sammy had a prison tattoo on the back of his hand, in the fleshy part between his thumb and index finger, that reads 14 and ½ which stood for the “twelve fucking jurors who convicted him, one for the fucking prosecutor who prosecuted him, one for the fucking judge who sentenced him, and half for the half-assed lawyer who defended him.” I don’t need any number tattooed on my hand to remind me of the fucking death penalty psychologist who certainly must have known how devastating this little tidbit of information, not included in his written report, was.
Another good things that came out of this ordeal was getting to know Coming Ball Gibbs, Jr., a well know Charleston lawyer who also opposed the death penalty. He came to watch the sentencing phase of our trial and would later become a mentor for me in my practice. We would work together on several cases. His knowledge and love of the law never ceased to amaze me. As he sat in the courtroom, I gave my closing argument which began with the simple statement, even on my best day, I would be inadequate to know how to measure the value of the life of another human being. Then I explained all the reasons that this would not be my best day. I talked about how physically and emotionally drained I was by the burden that had been placed upon me. I questioned my abilities as a lawyer, my faith, and my very belief in God’s mercy. Pontius Pilot washed his hands because there weren’t two witnesses to swear Jesus commited a capital offense. There was only one witness against Sammy, the immunized snitch. In the end, I was inadequate. I will never forget the two woman sitting on the front row of the jury who cried during my argument and still wonder to this day how they could have signed their names to the death verdict.
Unknown to me Coming Ball asked the court reporter for a copy of my argument and gave a copy to his friend, Molly Pratt. A few years later, I was looking to hire a new legal assistant and thought I was interviewing her for the job. It turned out Molly who was interviewing me. I guess I got the job because she became the best thing of all to come out the trial. Molly would become my assistant, my confidante, and my friend as we worked together for the next twenty-eight years.
Pete’s and my parts in this dance of death were over but, as in all such cases, the case was far from over. There would be a mandatory direct appeal, PCR, and federal habeus corpus reviews of Sammy’s conviction and sentence over the followingt eighteen years. I guess Pete and I can feel some measure of pride knowing there was never an allegation of ineffective assistance of counsel but it pales in comparison to the empty feeling your left with when your client is sentenced to death. In that time Danny Ray Coker would serve his sentence and be released. Wesley Copeland would die of a heart attack waiting on death row. Sammy alone would be executed by lethal injection on September 18, 1998. More money would have been spent on Sammy’s trial, appeals, and review proceedings than it would have cost to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. I remain a committed opponent of the death penalty. I know all too well the failures of our legal system. It is pure hubris to believe ours, or any legal system, could ever be foolproof enough to justify the taking of a life.
There is one other good thing that came out of this ordeal. I learned the hard way how to try a death penalty case. I gained invaluable knowledge and experience I would put to effective use not just in my second death penalty murder trial, but in every trial thereafter.
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