6.Family-History Mitigation Evidence Ruling

CASEY SECOR: All right. As an initial matter, the Defense has an obligation under the guidelines that have been created by the American Bar Association to conduct a thorough investigation of Capital Defendant's life history and it specifically requires that we go back, at least, two generations. The purpose, of course, being that we know that people are a consequence of where they come from. In large degree, that the patterns that exist in families and the events that occur within families can be extraordinarily impactful on the lives of other family members and can carry on and we see that in both, of course, positive and negative ways. What happened to Ms. Thornsberry is directly and specifically relevant to Tim, Jr., because she is not only his grandmother, but she became the person who was his default mother, to a degree, in his life when Cynthia abandoned him.

And it's particularly relevant for the jury to know the traumas and frailties of the people who Tim came from and how a child would have been affected by being raised by people like this. And I don't mean that in a condescending way because I am incredibility impressed with Ms. Thornsberry. The fact that she's still alive after everything she's been through is amazing to me and she is a representative of his family who has been through horrific tragedies, horrific abuse and she would agree that some of that horrific abuse has affected her. At points in her life, she was harmful and abusive to people in her family. Part of that is a consequence to the fact that she was raped by somebody who was supposed to protect her, her step-father, beginning when she was eight years old through the age of 11, getting pregnant, and then kidnapped her and her son and took them away from anybody who cared about them and protected them and she somehow persevered.

But she went into motherhood of Tim, Sr., as a 12-year-old, as a child, and that's something that's going to affect somebody who was raised by somebody who is, in effect, a child at the time that they gave birth and that carries over to Tim because when he is born, he is abused and neglected by a horrifically mentally ill mother who then abandons him and he is left in the care of Tim, Sr., and Ms. Thornsberry. The bare history, the bare past, what has shaped them and shaped their positive and their negative traits because they both have admitted to being abusive to people in their family at various times. Those two people were Tim's parental figures beginning at age three, but even before, from zero to three, he had the additional compounding factor of having a schizophrenic mother who neglected him.

The definition of mitigation under the United States Supreme Court Law is, anything the Defense offers as a reason to give the Defendant life or to not give him death and they can look to his family history. We can look to people like Ms. Thornsberry, seeing what she's gone through, and they can say Tim's death is not something that this family deserves. They can bestow mercy upon Tim. Even if they don't think that he's worthy of it himself, but they can say his life has value. His life has value to Ms. Thornsberry, somebody who was victimized in a way that no person ever should be. And I understand that Tim's kids were killed and he did it. I'm not trying to excuse that or say that it's any less than it is. It's horrific, but what happened to Ms. Thornsberry was horrific, as well, and it would be ineffective for me to not investigate it and present it as strong as I possibly can and I understand that Your Honor is not preventing me from investigating it.

But I cannot fathom how it can be alleged that this information is not relevant. I mean, I come from a family of lawyers and I'm a lawyer. Sometimes, I'm not particularly proud of that, but I think part of the reason I'm a lawyer is because of other lawyers in my family. I also have issues that I'm not particularly proud of. But I know people in my family have struggled with them and I just -- I think that the testimony from experts in this case about the crucial period of time from age zero to three when the brain grows almost seventy-five, your entire lifetime during those three years. It's particularly important to look at because it's during those three years -- those first three years that he has -- Tim has so many different influences and those influences are coming from people like Ms. Thornsberry who loved him and still love him desperately.

She would admit that what she went through was horrific and that her trauma that I think she's been through in her life affected other people and one of those people would be Tim. And I'm not -- no one's going to blame her for the deaths of these children. That's not what this is about. Tim has already been blamed and he will be blamed, but I'm trying to tell this jury the whole picture, which is what the United States Supreme Court has required us to do in these cases. And I think that a person's family history, where they come from, what makes them up, not only genetically, but also the people that create the environment in which you grow is the essence of mitigation.