Convicted of double murder, Donnie Rowe was spared the death penalty. Juror speaks out
The death penalty jury was obviously conflicted. Their deliberations, as one juror would later say, were at times “pretty heated.”
Bused up from south Georgia, sequestered in an Eatonton-area hotel and tasked with deciding whether Donnie Russell Rowe Jr. should live or die, the seven women and five men at one point asked Judge Brenda H. Trammell what would happen if they could not agree on a sentence for Rowe, who they had convicted of murder six days earlier.
“Could Rowe,” they asked, “be sentenced to life in a ‘supermax’ prison?”
The judge’s response to both questions was, as the law often requires, simple but vague: The jury had all the information and instructions that it was going to get. It was up to them.
Ultimately, after about eight hours of debate, jurors still could not reach a unanimous decision.
A Telegraph interview with one of the 12 jurors lends insight into the jury’s thinking and provides a glimpse into how at least one jury considered capital punishment. The Telegraph granted the juror anonymity for the juror’s protection.
‘A moral issue’
The jury’s indecision meant Rowe was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in a deadly 2017 prison bus escape.
Early that summer four years ago, he and another inmate had overpowered two correctional officers on a prison transport bus and killed them on a highway south of Lake Oconee.
It is a sentence the 48-year-old Rowe was, in essence, already serving after his conviction in a 2001 robbery at a Macon motel, his “third strike.”
As with many trials, the thinking goes, death penalty cases can be won or lost during jury selection. Lawyers on both sides often spend hours, days mulling over which jurors may lean their way.
The juror interviewed by the Telegraph said one thing that ”was a home run hit” for the defense was when attorney Franklin J. Hogue, one of Rowe’s lawyers, asked the jury during his closing statement to think long and hard before deciding whether to sentence Rowe to die by lethal injection.
“Something to the effect,” the juror recalled, “that ‘this is a moral issue. You need to look within yourself to see what you can vote for.’ ... That was it with (certain jurors). They wanted that loophole, to be able to say, ‘I’m a Christian. I can’t stand before God having judged this man.’”
Death penalty trials play out in two stages: a guilt-or-innocence phase followed, if necessary, by a penalty phase. In the latter, jurors decide whether a person should be sentenced to die.
The juror who spoke to The Telegraph described the atmosphere in the jury room during the second phase of deliberations as “pretty heated” at times.
Rowe’s defense attorneys, in presenting their case to spare Rowe’s life, had called to the witness stand relatives and friends of Rowe’s who recalled his harsh upbringing at the hands of abusive parents.
“The side that was voting for life,” the juror recalled, “they said that this man had good in him because he had these relationships with these family members. I don’t say that’s not correct. But there has to be consequences for your actions. ... (Rowe’s) actions caused those two (officers) to lose their life.”
The juror also said that during the long hours of deliberation in the penalty phase of Rowe’s trial, the vote was deadlocked from the beginning: five for death, six against, and one undecided. The juror said it appeared the six jury members who chose to spare Rowe’s life “were never going to vote for a death penalty verdict.”
“No one ever wavered,” the juror said, adding, “there was never a change.”
‘This man got away with double homicide’
The juror interviewed by the Telegraph was one of five who voted for the death penalty.
The juror deemed the outcome “disheartening.”
“Basically,” the juror said, “this man got away with double homicide.”
In describing the back-and-forth discussion in the jury room during the death penalty phase, the juror said that the jury took time going around the room asking each jury member to discuss their points of view and why they were either for or against sentencing Rowe to death.
“The people that were voting for death had many reasons,” the juror said. “They talked about all these things that were reasons, and the people that voted for life, their reasons had nothing to do with the law (or) Rowe and what happened. They only had to do with themselves. That’s all they would say, ‘I just can’t vote for death.’
“So it was not based on what the law said, what the evidence was that was presented to us. It was based on their moral feelings.”
Public opinion toward capital punishment across the country has continued to evolve over the past few decades. A June report from the Pew Research Center said support for capital punishment has “declined substantially” in that time, although it noted “60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder.”
In 2020, 17 people were executed in the U.S., down from a high of 98 in 1999. Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty, including eight in the last 10 years. Public pressure has led companies to end production of the drugs used for lethal injections, leaving states with scheduled executions scrambling to find alternative methods.
There are 39 people on death row in Georgia, although that includes inmates awaiting retrials or resentencing. Many were convicted decades ago, as far back as 1982, and most in the ’90s and early 2000s. The state’s last execution was that of Donnie Cleveland Lance in January 2020.
The end of the death penalty?
Rowe’s sentence has left his attorney Hogue wondering if “what we’re witnessing is the dying gasps of the death penalty.”
Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who oversaw the investigation into the bus escape, the killings and the capture of Rowe and his alleged accomplice, Ricky “Juvie” Dubose, said that while he respects the jury’s verdict he worries about the message it sends.
Prosecutors will likely also seek a death penalty verdict for Dubose, who they contend was the one who actually gunned down the two guards on the prison bus. Dubose’s sentence, should he go to trial, could be even more impactful in predicting the future of the death penalty in Georgia.
Rowe will now be housed in the isolated, ultra-restrictive confines of the Special Management Unit at the state prison near Interstate 75 west of Jackson, where inmates are, weather permitting, allowed one hour or so a day outside in iron-barred cages. He may well never leave that prison’s grounds again.
Ron McAndrew, a former Florida prison warden who oversaw that state’s death row, is now an outspoken critic against capital punishment. He testified for the defense at Rowe’s trial to describe the super-secure and spartan living conditions where Rowe would spend the rest of his days if not sent to death row.
McAndrew had a year or so earlier visited the Georgia prison’s S.M.U. cellblock and witnessed firsthand its bleak and unsparing surroundings.
A week or so later when asked by The Telegraph to describe the conditions in the prison’s isolation wing where Rowe will now be housed, McAndrew said that for Rowe it will be “a life that is totally removed from the world as citizens know it.”
“It will be a life of solitude, of structure, of serious discipline,” McAndrew said.
“You will not be treated nice. You will be spoken to formally all the time. There won’t be any chit-chat conversations between him and officers. Especially him.”