EJI won a life sentence for Brett Yeiter by presenting evidence at a new sentencing hearing that persuaded the Escambia County trial court to reject the death penalty and impose a life sentence. We achieved this result after successfully arguing at the Alabama appellate courts that Mr. Yeiter’s original death sentence was not properly imposed.
Mr. Yeiter was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in the tragic 2014 shooting death of his father-in-law. EJI appealed Mr. Yeiter’s conviction and death sentence and, in 2021, won relief from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. The court reversed Mr. Yeiter’s conviction and sentence because it found that the trial court erred in admitting prejudicial evidence at trial. The Alabama Supreme Court, however, reinstated the conviction and death sentence in 2022.
When the case returned to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the court held that the trial court had applied the wrong law at sentencing and a new sentencing hearing was required.
At the time of Mr. Yeiter’s trial in 2019, Alabama had abolished judicial override—the arbitrary and unreliable practice of permitting elected trial judges to override jury sentencing verdicts. The trial judge believed this change in the law meant he was required to follow the jury’s non-unanimous verdict and impose the death penalty.
But the Court of Criminal Appeals held that the law in effect at the time of the offense applied, which meant the final sentencing decision was up to the trial court, not the jury.
As a result, the appeals court vacated Mr. Yeiter’s death sentence on June 28, 2024, and sent the case back to Escambia County for the trial court to hold a sentencing hearing and impose a new sentence.
On September 23, 2024, a new trial judge held a sentencing hearing where EJI lawyers presented evidence establishing mitigating circumstances and argued that there was no legal basis for one of the aggravating factors. EJI argued that death was not the appropriate sentence in this case because the compelling mitigating factors outweighed the remaining aggravating factor.
The trial court agreed. It found that the facts of the case did not support a finding that the offense was “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel compared to other capital offenses” because there was no evidence that the defendant’s actions were unnecessarily torturous.
That left a single aggravating factor based on a nearly 30-year-old armed robbery conviction—and the trial court took into account that Mr. Yeiter was only a teenager at the time of that offense.
Based on the evidence presented, the trial court found Mr. Yeiter’s psychological condition was a mitigating factor. “[I]t was obvious that the Defendant suffers from some psychiatric problems due to trauma and loss experienced as a child,” the court wrote in its sentencing order.
At the sentencing hearing, EJI presented testimony from the victim’s family members. Both the victim’s widow and one of the victim’s daughters asked the court not to impose the death penalty, telling the court that sentencing Mr. Yeiter to death would cause further anguish and suffering to the family. The trial court found that this testimony “regarding the trauma to the family that would be caused by the imposition of the death penalty is most convincing.”
The court found the victim’s wife’s testimony especially compelling, writing in its order that she “was essentially pleading that the death penalty not be invoked to spare the family further pain and anguish.”
On October 21, 2024, the trial court issued a new sentencing order rejecting death and imposing a life-without-parole sentence. “When weighing the mitigating circumstances against the single aggravating circumstance,” the judge wrote, “the Court is convinced that the mitigating circumstances outweigh the aggravating circumstance.”