Two Servicemen Suffering From Brain Trauma, PTSD Win Death-Penalty Relief – Death Penalty Information Center
Two servicemen—one a former airman on the U.S. military death row, another a decorated Vietnam veteran sentenced to death in Pennsylvania—have won relief from their capital convictions or death sentences. On August 1, 2018, the La Crosse Tribune reported that an Air Force court martial jury had imposed a life sentence on senior airman Andrew Witt (pictured, left) following a three-week capital resentencing trial. The verdict in Witt’s case came two years after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces—the nation’s highest military court—overturned his 2005 death sentence for murdering a fellow airman and his wife. On July 25, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvana granted death-row prisoner Robert Fisher (pictured, right) a new trial and sentencing hearing in the July 1980 murder of his girlfriend. If that case continues to a new capital trial, it will be Fisher’s third trial and fourth capital sentencing hearing. Witt’s conviction in 2005 marked the first time a U.S. airman had been sentenced to death since 1992. His death sentence was first overturned in August 2013, when the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals—an intermediate appellate court—ruled that his lawyers had been ineffective in failing to present mitigating evidence that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury four months before the murders. The military appealed that decision, and Witt’s death sentence was reinstated by the Air Force Court of Appeals in July 2014. However, the Armed Forces appeals court agreed that Witt’s penalty-phase lawyers had been ineffective and remanded the case for a new sentencing hearing. With Witt’s resentencing, four prisoners remain on the U.S. military death row.
