Shawn Paul Humphries is entitled to a new sentencing...

Shawn Paul Humphries is entitled to a new sentencing because his lawyers failed to object when the prosecutor compared the value of the killer's life to that of his victim, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled Monday. The 2-1 decision by a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence given to Shawn Paul Humphries for the 1993 murder of Mendel Alton "Dickie" Smith. "This side-by-side comparison of the relative value of two lives was calculatedly incendiary and rendered the sentencing fundamentally infirm," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Allyson Duncan. "...A defendant may not be condemned simply for being deemed, over the long trajectory of life, a less estimable human being than his victim." The failure of Humphries's 2 lawyers to object amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel, the court ruled. The prosecutor's comparative worth argument "should have struck those learned in the law like a bucket of ice water," Wilkinson wrote. On the Net: http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov