To Save the Life of Nathan Wayne Bowie

In the evening of May 23, 1991, in Catawba County, N.C., two men shot at 20-year-old Nathan Bowie's aunt and uncle. Nathan was told that his aunt may have been raped by the same two men. The next morning, Nathan and his uncle shot and killed the two men.

Nathan was appointed an attorney known to be an alcoholic to represent him on the murder charges. That attorney, the older "lead" counsel in the case, had been an alcoholic for decades. The attorney was going through a divorce at the same time he was representing Nathan. He continued to drink heavily while he went through the motions of representing Nathan. During this time, he was involved in a motor vehicle accident after which his blood alcohol level registered .40, which is five times the legal limit. A blood alcohol level that high is enough to kill the average man.

Nathan's second attorney was almost fresh out of law school and took orders from the alcoholic lead attorney. Together, they spent less than three hours preparing for the sentencing phase of Nathan's trial, the part where the jury decides if he will live or die.

The United States Supreme Court has said that lawyers must tell the full story of their client's lives in the sentencing phase of a capital trial, because the jury is not only supposed to take into account the facts of the crime, but they must also weigh the factors that shaped the client's life. Background matters. Things like physical or sexual abuse, mental illness, alcohol or drug abuse and other influences on a person's life need to be taken into account in order for the jury to fairly judge culpability.

The attorneys did not interview Nathan's family members, his friends, or the people their client lived with most of his life. These types of witnesses are critical in giving jurors the full picture of someone's life.

The court-appointed attorneys did not interview a single person who lived or worked at the Sipe's Orchard Boys Home where Nathan had lived for almost six years after the Department of Social Services removed him from the poverty-stricken home of his alcoholic and drug-addicted mother. Nathan lived in the boys' home during the formative ages of 13 to 19-years of age.

Neither the jury nor his lawyers knew very much about Nathan Bowie because the lawyers did not bother to ask for the hundreds of pages of records about Nathan's life. They didn't ask for the Department of Social Services records, school records, mental health records or records from the boys' home.

Because they did not investigate, they did not know that Nathan was a favorite of many of the house parents and other kids at the boys' home. They did not know that other children at the boys' home had been raped by a house-parent, and Nathan slept with a big stick to make sure the same didn't happen to him. The jury never heard about the racial epithets used by a house-parent at the boys’ home, or the physical abuse there.

The jury that sentenced Nathan to die did not know that the Guardian Ad Litem for the county found the boys' home to be an "injurious environment" for the youngsters who lived there.

Nathan's alcoholic attorney did not return the phone calls or the overtures from the scores of boys' home workers who cared about Nathan and offered to testify for him, including a deputy sheriff who had lived and worked at the boys' home.

The jury never heard any of this because the attorneys were incompetent, or in the words of the Federal Judge, their performance was constitutionally "deficient." But the Federal Judge decided that all the witnesses that were not presented at trial would not have made a difference in the end under the high habeas corpus standard of review.

The problem started when the first judge to review Nathan's case, a state superior court judge, had signed a 100-page proposed order prepared by the Office of the Attorney General, and didn't change a word of it. From that point on, it’s hard to overturn the "facts" and state law conclusions found in that initial order even when they are incorrect. The initial state judge's findings can be wrong and the execution will still be carried out. The Federal death penalty statute requires the legal findings to be not just wrong, but unreasonably wrong.

Nathan Bowie could be put to death because an advocate in the Attorney General's office prepared an order that a superior court judge signed, and though wrong, the order wasn't wrong or bad enough.

We will keep you posted on the developments, and later, what you can do to help save Nathan's life.