Governor's Clemency Office 4294 Mail Service Center Raleigh, N.C. 27699-4294 Phone: 919-715-1695 Fax: 919-715-8623 e-mail: clemency@nc.gov
When Nathan Bowie went on trial for his life, the lawyer in charge of his defense was drinking nine shots of 80-proof rum every night. Tom Portwood, who later died of alcohol-related illnesses, was an alcoholic for 30 years. On his deathbed, he admitted he started drinking as soon as he woke up in the morning and went to court drunk, that drinking affected his decision-making as a lawyer, and that many people went to jail because of his malpractice.
During his representation of Bowie, Portwood was involved in a car wreck and his blood alcohol level was measured a near-fatal .40, five times the legal limit. It is largely due to Portwood’s disastrous legal representation that Bowie sits on death row today. Bowie and his uncle were tried together and sentenced to death for the murders of two Catawba County men, Nelson Shuford and Calvin Wilson, in 1991. The night before their deaths, while with Shuford, Wilson shot at or near Bowie’s aunt and uncle. Bowie’s uncle led him to accept that seeking revenge on the men was a family obligation. Bowie, who was 20 at the time, and his uncle sought out the men and shot them.
It was an inexcusable crime, but competent legal representation almost certainly would have saved Bowie’s life. First, Bowie turned down an offer to plead guilty to second-degree murder, which would have spared him a death sentence. Portwood never took the time to discuss in detail with Bowie the advantages of the plea or why he should accept it. Then, when he went to trial, Portwood and his inexperienced co-counsel put on no evidence in the guilt phase of the trial and next to none in the sentencing phase. They also failed to hire a mental health expert, and as a result, the jury never heard the tragic story of Bowie’s life.
Bowie endured a childhood of extreme physical and sexual abuse, neglect and chaos – the type of social history that the U.S. Supreme Court says defines mitigating evidence and, if presented to a jury, begs for a life sentence. At the time of his birth, Bowie’s father was in prison for murder. His mother was 16 years old and addicted to drugs and alcohol. She whipped him with a strap and punched him in the chest as a toddler. When he was just preschool age, she locked him in a room alone for hours at a time. His mother had many children, whom she often left alone for long periods. They were extremely poor, moved frequently and lived in conditions so squalid that the children were bitten by rats. They were sometimes homeless, and when Bowie was eight, they lived in a battered women’s shelter. Bowie was also sexually abused by his grandmother’s boyfriend. The Department of Social Services removed Bowie from his mother’s care when he was 12 years old. He was sent to Sipe’s Boys Home, where he lived from ages 13 to 19 — and was sexually abused again.
Sexual abuse was rampant at Sipes during that time, and Bowie slept with a large stick he called his “protector.” He and the other black children were also subjected to constant racial epithets. Sipes has been investigated, and at least one employee has been prosecuted for sexually assaulting a child there. Prosecutors also failed to turn over key mitigating evidence, such as the victim’s history of violence towards women and evidence of sexual, physical, and verbal abuse at Sipes. The prosecutor said in closing argument that Sipes was a decent place, despite the fact that he had previously signed off on a plea agreement in a case involving three sexual assaults against Sipes’ residents.
Bowie is African American. In the sentencing phase of his trial, the prosecutor urged the jury of 11 whites and one African American to impose the death penalty by referencing a “gangland” type shooting - not at all the circumstances of this crime.
The federal courts found that Nathan’s trial lawyers’ representation of him was “deficient” but found no prejudice. Bowie v. Polk, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74839 (W.D.N.C. 2006), aff’d Bowie v. Branker, 512 F.3d 112 (4th Cir. 2008), U.S. cert. denied.
Nathan has a Racial Justice Act motion pending, but the General Assembly amended the law after another death row prisoner won his claim based in part on identical state-wide statistics of racial discrimination that would have granted Nathan a life-in-prison sentence without parole. The jury that sentenced Nathan to death never heard from the Sipes boys’ home witnesses – the people who loved and knew Nathan best. Due to procedural rules, the federal judge refused to consider evidence that Portwood perjured himself about his alcohol usage at Nathan’s Motion for Appropriate Relief (MAR) hearing.
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