When Edward Lemons was sentenced to death in 1995, attorneys Michael Unti and Margaret Lumsden were upset, sure that their client was innocent. And when they recently found out he was so ill that he would die in two months, they decided to take action, filing a petition with the state to have Lemons released to hospice care.
Unti and Lumsden were trying to honor Lemons' last wish--to die with his family in Detroit--but their efforts failed, with the state denying the clemency request Friday and Lemons dying of natural causes early Monday morning.
Lemons, who was convicted of the first-degree kidnapping and murder of a man and woman in 1994, was placed on the "seriously ill list" last Tuesday. He suffered from hemophilia, cirrhosis, hepatitis C, HIV and possibly liver cancer.
The new classification meant that he and his visitors no longer had to be separated by a pane of bullet-proof glass.
Even before Lemons was placed on the list, Unti and Lumsden asked the state to apply a 2001 statute allowing the release of terminally-ill patients that pose no threat to society and are expected to die within a year.
"This is not a situation of altering Ed's sentence," Lumsden said last week. "It's the question: Can he be with his family? Can his mother hold his hand?"
But the request was denied by Gov. Mike Easley and the Department of Corrections Friday, and Lemons' mother, who cares for her grandchild, was unable to be with him when he died at Raleigh's Central Prison.
"It is very progressive legislation," Unti said. "Nobody imagined its application to a death row inmate."
The two lawyers, however, argued that because there were so many doubts about Lemons' guilt, he should have been allowed to be with his family.
In 1994, police discovered the bodies of a man and woman in a field near Dudley, N.C. The victims had been kidnapped and shot to death while trying to buy crack cocaine. Lemons was arrested along with his cousin and another man, and the three were tried separately.
"In Ed's trial, the [district attorney] said he was the ring leader and shot one or both of the victims," Lumsden said.
"In the subsequent trials, the DA said he did not participate in the kidnapping. These are directly opposed statements."
Additionally, she pointed to a statement the prosecuting DA had made at the end of another trial--"It very well may be that Ed Lemons was not a shooter at all"--as casting doubt on her client's guilt.
"I have absolute confidence Ed Lemons was not guilty of first-degree kidnapping and first-degree murder," Unti said.
He and Lumsden also complained that their client was receiving acetaminophen with codeine in jail rather than a stronger painkiller.
When the attorneys insisted, prison officials began giving Lemons morphine treatment. "It is so barbaric in this day and age that we think someone should be allowed to die in excessive pain and extreme suffering, which is what is happening now," Unti said.
The pair of attorneys are now trying to work out funeral arrangements so Lemons' family does not have to coordinate them from Detroit.
"Ed Lemons' case raises important questions about how the death penalty is administered in North Carolina," they wrote in a statement Monday. "Can we continue to support the death penalty where, routinely, the least culpable person involved in the crime receives a death sentence and the more culpable persons receive life sentences?"
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