By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — A federal appeals court today reinstated a death sentence for an Arkansas inmate convicted of killing a teenager who gave information about him to police.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis overturned a district judge’s ruling that set aside the death sentence of Jason Farrell McGehee, 33, who was convicted of capital murder in the 1996 torture and strangling death of John Melbourne in Harrison.
The federal appeals court also upheld a U.S. district judge’s ruling that an Arkansas prison guard placed an inmate in a mosquito-infested cell in retaliation for a grievance the inmate filed against him.
Prosecutors said Melbourne was involved with McGehee in a scheme to pass stolen checks and was killed for talking to police about the scheme.
The judge who set aside McGehee’s death sentence found that mitigating evidence, including evidence that when McGehee was a child his father slit the throats of his pet dogs, was improperly excluded during the sentencing phase of his trial. The judge ordered the state to grant McGehee a new trial on sentencing or change his sentence to life without parole.
The state appealed, and today the 8th Circuit reinstated McGehee’s death sentence.
“McGehee’s mother testified that McGehee was not physically abused or neglected as a child. Accordingly, the trial judge’s statement that the incident was ‘an isolated act of cruelty to animals that happened years and years ago’ appears to have been a fair characterization,” the 8th Circuit panel said in its opinion.
In a separate case, the 8th Circuit upheld a U.S. district judge’s ruling ordering prison guard Patrick Stephenson to pay $2,500 in punitive damages to Walter Haynes, 49, an inmate at the Tucker Maximum Security Unit.
Haynes, who is serving a 40-year sentence for first-degree murder in the 1997 shooting deaths of two brothers in El Dorado, alleged in a lawsuit that after he filed a grievance accusing Stephenson of cursing at and threatening him, he was moved to a hot, bug-infested cell in an isolation wing for several days in retaliation.
Stephenson argued that the move was not retaliatory, but a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit said in its opinion Wednesday that immediately after Stephenson learned of Haynes’ grievance, he filed a disciplinary report accusing Haynes of filing a false grievance.
State Department of Correction regulations prohibit corrections officers from filing disciplinary reports against inmates for filing false grievances.
The federal appeals court also said it agreed with the lower court that Stephenson’s testimony that he never cursed at Haynes came close to “outright perjury.”
Stephenson has admitted cursing at other inmates and has said he prefers cursing at inmates to writing disciplinary reports, the 8th Circuit noted.
In testimony in the Haynes case, Stephenson said he was sure he did not use “the F word” because he favored “the MF word.”
“Based on Stephenson’s decision to file a knowingly untruthful disciplinary report in deliberate disregard of ADC regulations, we cannot say that the district court erred in finding that Stephenson’s retaliation against Haynes was reprehensible,” the appeals court said in its opinion.
