The Akron Legal News

Death row inmate who brutally murdered his ex-girlfriend has appeal denied

ANNIE YAMSON
Special to the Legal News
Published: August 3, 2016

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week denied habeas corpus relief for death row inmate Grady Brinkley after finding “little that one could say in mitigation” of his crimes.

Brinkley was sentenced to death after he was found guilty of the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend, 18-year-old Shantae Smith.

Court documents state that, following an arrest for a robbery during which he punched a woman, Brinkley was bailed out of jail by Smith.

While in jail, Brinkley allegedly told another inmate that he planned to murder Smith and leave town for Chicago.

On January 7, 2000, Brinkley strangled Smith, slit her throat and left her to bleed to death on her apartment floor while he stole her ATM card and called the local Greyhound Bus station.

Before getting on a bus, Brinkley tried 16 times to use Smith’s ATM card and failed for lack of a PIN code.

Video surveillance showed Brinkley wearing Smith’s coat, which was conspicuously small on him.

Brinkley’s bloody footprints were found at the murder scene along with a bogus note in his handwriting but purportedly signed by Smith saying, “Will be gone to Atlanta for seven days to see my friend, could you please not fix my sink until I get back.”

The manhunt that followed was brief. Six days after the murder, an FBI fugitive task force arrested Brinkley at his mother’s residence in Chicago. He was wearing Smith’s coat and the same pair of shoes that left the bloody murder scene footprints.

An uncooperative Brinkley drove his first two attorneys to withdraw from the case.

A second pair of lawyers appointed by the court, John Thebes and Merle Dech, likewise found Brinkley to be difficult especially in the search for mitigating evidence.

After Brinkley was found guilty by a jury on all charges, he spoke at length on his own behalf at the sentencing phase of the trial stating that “my counsel did a piss poor job in representing me” and refuting the mitigating evidence presented by his attorneys that he was raised in poverty.

Before imposing the death penalty, the trial judge addressed Brinkley directly, stating, “You are a manipulative, very cold and calculating individual, and you have a very cruel and vicious side to you.”

The trial judge cited the fact that Brinkley left Smith for dead while she bled out and he made some calls and solidified his plans to get out of town. He cited the coroner, who determined that Smith may have been alive for up to a half an hour after her throat was cut.

The judge also called Brinkley a “predator of women.”

Brinkley’s appeal came to the 6th Circuit court after his appeals were rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court and several postconviction relief petitions found no footing in state court.

After his petition for habeas relief was denied in the federal district court at Youngstown, Brinkley brought his arguments to the 6th Circuit, arguing that the state’s evidence in support of the death penalty was insufficient.

Specifically, Brinkley argued that his lawyers should have done more to prepare for the mitigation phase of his trial in order to show that he had a traumatic childhood, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and an alcohol and crack cocaine dependence.

In an opinion authored by Judge Raymond Kethledge, the circuit court held that none of that evidence would have helped Brinkley.

“First, Brinkley’s lawyers did present substantial evidence of his childhood trauma at trial,” Kethledge wrote, citing testimony that Brinkley was born to a 14-year-old mother and that his father was murdered when he was 7 years old.

Brinkley also argued that his diagnosis by a clinical psychologist of Narcissistic Personality Disorder was a “severe psychiatric condition.”

According to him, evidence of the disorder “would have helped explain the criminal activity” and “humanized” him for the jury.

The court of appeals held that, if common experience is any guide, Brinkley’s narcissism would not have made him more sympathetic to a jury.

On the contrary, it noted that Brinkley would have likely lost a battle of psychological experts at trial because evidence of his diagnosis would have opened the door to the state presenting its own clinical experts at trial and potential testimony that Brinkley was also a psychopath.

“And that diagnosis would explain his criminal activity in a way decidedly unhelpful to his cause at trial,” Kethledge wrote. “Indeed, it would have only confirmed the truth of what the trial judge said when he imposed a sentence of death.”

Additionally, the reviewing court held that any evidence of Brinkley’s alcohol and crack cocaine abuse would have been “a double-edged sword” and there was no guarantee that the jury would have reacted positively to it.

In a final bid for habeas relief, Brinkley argued that his attorneys should have called on a jail chaplain to testify that Brinkley “pledged his life to God” while he was once held in a jail in Illinois and that he “was a mentor of sorts” to other inmates.

That testimony, the appellate court ruled, would simply have elicited questions about Brinkley’s criminal history, which is replete with violent sexual assaults.

“In sum, the record reveals little that one could say in mitigation of Grady Brinkley’s murder of Shantae Smith,” Kethledge concluded. “And what little one could say, was largely said.”

The judgment of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio denying habeas relief for Brinkley was affirmed with Chief Judge John Rogers and Judge R. Guy Cole concurring.

The case is cited Brinkley v. Houk, case No. 12-3011.

[Back]