Editor’s Note: Sandy Hodson’s 14-part investigation into how justice is administered in the Brunswick Judicial District continues today with Part 7. This story looks into the case of Larry Jenkins. Earlier installments of the series can be found elsewhere in The Augusta Press website. Series stories will be published on Sundays and Thursdays.
The Larry Jenkins murder case was coming back.
The Georgia Supreme Court dealt the Brunswick Judicial district attorney’s office a blow on Feb. 27, 2006, when the court ruled death row inmate Larry Jenkins had been unfairly tried, convicted and sentenced to death in Wayne County.
Golden Isles Injustice
Part 7
Jenkins was 17 years old when he was convicted in 1995 of murder, kidnapping and armed robbery in the Jan. 8, 1993, slayings of Terry Ralston and her 15-year-old son, Michael.
Jenkins was arrested the day after the 37-year-old mother and son were found shot to death in a ditch in Wayne County. Jenkins and three others were stopped driving Ralston’s white van. They jumped from the van and ran.
Strategies that worked for the prosecution eight years earlier in Larry Lee’s death penalty trial for the Jones family murders was repeated in Jenkins’s trial in September 1995. Again, evidence was withheld from the defense and perjured testimony was presented. It would be 10 more years before the prestigious law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell – selected in 2021 as law firm of the year by American Lawyer for its services and commitment to pro bono work – got Jenkins’ case before a judge for a habeas corpus hearing.
Anne Workman of the Dekalb County Superior Court bench granted Jenkins’ petition July 19, 2005. Workman concluded that Jenkins’ defense had been woefully inadequate at his trial in Wayne County. She also found that prosecutors illegally withheld evidence, presented perjured testimony and failed to turn over evidence of a witness’ history of psychological and behavioral instability.
According to the judge’s review of evidence presented during the habeas petition, law enforcement officers who investigated the Ralstons’ murders did nothing to follow up on leads that indicated others were involved in the killings.
Law enforcement may have either never interviewed or dismissed witnesses who implicated two other young men in the murders. And they ignored a fellow officer’s reports and evidence that one of those two other men, Michael Woods, had stolen the weapon used to kill Ralston and her son.
MORE: Golden Isles Injustice: Evidence disappears in 2003 Brunswick Judicial District murder case
Waycross Police Detective Teresa Grant called Wayne County Sheriff’s Office to share what she had learned about Woods during a burglary investigation. She was told the Ralstons’ murders was a GBI case. She called the GBI and was told the GBI already had their suspect and the case was closed.
Woods’ girlfriend told Grant that the night of the Ralstons’ murders, Woods gave her a shotgun and jewelry to pawn. She also said she thought his jeans were stained with blood. Grant gave the woman’s statement and the pawn receipt to investigators in the Jenkins case. They did nothing with the information.
The prosecution not only failed to share that information as required, Assistant District Attorney John B. Johnson “vehemently objected to any mention of Woods’ name” at trial. Johnson insisted there was no evidence Woods took part in the murders or that he was even present. Woods passed a polygraph, Johnson said in court.
Prosecutors also withheld information about a witness who testified he heard Jenkins’ tell another jail inmate that he had already killed two white people, and it wouldn’t bother him to kill another. The witness had a history of mental health treatment, and a doctor reported that he would qualify for a verdict of guilty but mentally ill. That information would have impacted his credibility as a trial witness had the defense learned of his history.
Prosecutors also withheld the jailhouse witness’s two letters to District Attorney Glenn Thomas in which he admitted he was a drug addict. Also withheld was another witness’s statement that she didn’t know the young man who dropped a gun as he ran from police when they stopped the Ralstons’ van. But at trial, the witness testified that young man was Jenkins, whom she had known since the day he was born.
The habeas judge was also skeptical about the veracity of Jenkins’ statement he gave on Jan. 10, 1993.
“(It’s) unreliable given (Jenkins) intellectual deficiencies and the fact that the statement was not written by (Jenkins),” the judge said.
The statement also wasn’t recorded or videotaped.
GBI Agent Joe Wooten testified Jenkins confessed that he alone killed the Ralstons. Jenkins told his lawyers that he was there when Woods killed the mother and child, but he didn’t tell the police because Woods threatened to kill his family if he talked.
Woods was questioned. He had an alibi – he had been with his girlfriend and her mother. No one bothered to verify that until years later when Jenkins’ habeas defense team found the girlfriend and her mother. Both denied Woods was with them that night.
As would be repeated in other criminal investigations in the Brunswick Judicial District, law enforcement failed to try to obtain evidence. In the Ralstons’ case, fingerprints taken from the victims’ van and at the laundromat from where they where kidnapped were never analyzed or identified. Footprint evidence from the scene where the victims were shot was also ignored, and by the time a search was made for shell casings and spent bullets at the scene, the site had been trampled. No tests were done to see if any of the four young men who fled from the van had blood on their clothing or gunshot residue on their hands or clothing, Judge Workman found.
“Overwhelming credible evidence has been presented in this habeas proceeding that the prosecution committed intentional misconduct which violated due process thus denying (Jenkins) his right to a fair trial and which rendered the outcome of the trial fundamentally unreliable,” Workman wrote.
MORE: Golden Isles Injustice: Scandal vexes Glynn County Police Department for years
The Brunswick Judicial Circuit appealed Workman’s decision. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed it, finding Jenkins’ defense team was so inept, justice demanded a new trial. The justices ignored Workman’s additional finding that the case was so riddled with prosecutorial misconduct justice demanded a reversal of Jenkins’ conviction.
At retrial, although Jenkins’ statement to the GBI was suppressed the first time, Judge Stephen G. Scarlett allowed it. What wasn’t presented was evidence about Woods and others’ possible participation in the killings, according to news coverage of the trial by two different newspapers. Jenkins’ public defender didn’t call the witnesses who could have implicated the others.
Jenkins was convicted again. He remains in prison.
Sandy Hodson is a staff reporter covering courts for The Augusta Press. Reach her at sandy@theaugustapress.com.
