Doyle Lee Hamm (February 14, 1957 – November 28, 2021) was an American death row inmate in Alabama, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1987 murder of Patrick Cunningham, whom he killed while committing a robbery. While on death row, Hamm developed lymphatic cancer, which made it difficult to impossible to achieve the venous access necessary to administer the drugs used in lethal injections. Despite months of warning by Hamm's attorney and human rights observers and a decades' long legal battle, the Alabama Department of Corrections attempted to execute Hamm on February 22, 2018. The unsuccessful execution attempt lasted nearly three hours and drew international attention. In March 2018, Hamm and the state of Alabama reached a confidential settlement, the terms of which precluded a second execution attempt, giving Hamm a de facto sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, although his sentence was not formally commuted. Hamm remained in prison until his death from cancer-related complications in 2021.
Early life
Hamm was born on February 14, 1957, and grew up in northwest Alabama, the tenth of twelve children. While he was growing up, Hamm's father and each of his six older brothers spent time in jail. In an interview, one of Hamm's sisters described their childhood home as “constant hell all the time” and recalled that her father told his children that “If you don’t go out and steal, then you’re not a Hamm.” From an early age, Hamm struggled in school. Tests and report cards indicated that, in the fifth grade, Hamm was still reading at a first-grade level. Hamm dropped out of school during the ninth grade and began abusing drugs and alcohol.
At the age of twenty, Hamm was arrested and charged with robbery after a drunken fight in a bar parking lot. Hamm entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to five years in prison. Years later, the alleged victim confessed that no robbery had ever taken place and Hamm's court-appointed attorney admitted that he had been “too busy and overworked to give this case the time and attention it needed.” Hamm was arrested other times for burglary, assault, and grand larceny.
Murder of Patrick Cunningham
On January 24, 1987, Hamm went on a crime spree that culminated in a motel robbery at the Anderson Motel in Cullman, Alabama, and the murder of Patrick Cunningham, a nighttime clerk at the motel. Three hundred and fifty dollars was taken from the motel's cash register () as well as $60 from Cunningham’s wallet (). Cunningham was shot once in the temple with a .38 caliber pistol that had been stolen in a robbery committed by Hamm in Mississippi earlier the same day. On the following day, January 25, 1987 Hamm was arrested in Cullman and charged with capital murder.
Two individuals claiming to be witnesses to the crime initially identified Hamm as the gunman during the robbery, but soon recanted their testimony. Those individuals were later charged as co-defendants and took deals to testify as state witnesses. During questioning, Hamm confessed to committing the robbery.
Problems at trial and on appeal
Problems at trial
Hamm's 1987 trial was divided into two parts: a first stage during which a jury would determine whether Hamm was guilty and, if it found him guilty, a second phase during which the jury would determine whether life imprisonment or a death sentence was the appropriate punishment. During the second phase of the trial, defense attorneys are able to present mitigating evidence to the jury, in order to argue that the defendant should be sentenced to life imprisonment instead of death.
Hamm's defense attorney spent only 19 minutes presenting mitigation evidence. None of the medical and education records indicating that Hamm may have had brain damage or an intellectual disability were presented to the jury, even though the records were available. Additionally, evidence that Hamm suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and that he had an IQ of only 66 was not presented to the jury. The defense counsel's failure to present this evidence to the jury became the subject of subsequent appeals, which raised the possibility that Hamm's attorney was so ineffective as to violate the Sixth Amendment.