lawyers to obtain the unclaimed check in the hope that they could present it at the trial to
confirm George’s confused mental state. The lawyers, who were still bickering over the
money, cashed the check to pay themselves instead of using it as evidence.
George was convicted and given the death penalty. By the time we at EJI got involved, he
had been on death row for several years, moving inexorably toward execution. When I met
him, prison doctors were heavily medicating him with psychotropic drugs, which at least
stabilized his behavior. It was so abundantly clear that George was mentally ill that it came as
no shock when we discovered that the doctor who had examined him at Bryce Hospital was a
fraud with no medical training. “Dr. Ed Seger” had made up his credentials. He had never
graduated from college but had fooled hospital officials into believing he was a trained
physician with expertise in psychiatry. He had masqueraded at the hospital for eight years
conducting competency evaluations on people accused of crimes before his fraud was
uncovered.
I represented George in his federal court proceedings. There, the State acknowledged that
Seger was an imposter but wouldn’t agree that George was entitled to a new trial. We
eventually won a favorable ruling from a federal judge who overturned his conviction and
sentence. Because of his mental illness and incompetency, George was never retried or
prosecuted. He has been at a mental institution ever since. But there are likely hundreds of
other people imprisoned after an evaluation by “Dr. Seger” whose convictions have never
been reviewed.
A lot of my clients on death row have had serious mental illnesses, but it wasn’t always
obvious that their history of mental illness predated their time in prison, since symptoms of
their disabilities could be episodic and were frequently stress-induced. But Avery Jenkins’s
letters, handwritten in print so small I needed a magnifying glass to read them, convinced me
that he had been very ill for a long time.
I looked up his case and began to piece together his story. It turned out he’d been convicted
of the very disturbing and brutal murder of an older man. The multiple stab wounds inflicted
on the victim strongly suggested mental illness, but the court records and files never
referenced anything about Jenkins suffering from a disability. I thought I’d find out more by
meeting him in person.
When I pulled into the prison parking lot, I noticed a pickup truck there that looked like a
shrine to the Old South: It was completely covered with disturbing bumper stickers,
Confederate flag decals, and other troubling images. Confederate flag license plates are
everywhere in the South, but some of the bumper stickers were new to me. A lot were about
guns and Southern identity. One read, IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS, I’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN DAMN
COTTON. Despite growing up around images of the Confederate South and working in the Deep
South for many years, I was pretty shaken by the symbols.
I’d always been especially interested in the post-Reconstruction era of American history.
My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. She was born in Virginia in
the 1880 s, after federal troops had been withdrawn and a reign of violence and terror had
begun, designed to deny any political or social rights for African Americans. Her father told
her stories of how the recently emancipated black people were essentially re-enslaved by
former Confederate officers and soldiers, who used violence, intimidation, lynching, and