USA - Georgia. Jonathen Jarrells had the death sentence reduced.

Jonathen Jarrells had the death sentence reduced. At the agreement of his lawyers and the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit district attorney's office, Judge Brian House signed a consent order, reducing Jarrells' murder sentence to life with the possibility of parole. Times Free Press archives show that in 1987 Jarrells killed Gertie Elrod, 71, and almost killed Lorraine Elrod, 75, during a home invasion. A Catoosa County jury convicted Jarrells of murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault. In 1988 he received a life sentence and the death penalty. Questions about Jarrells' sentence arose two years later, when a lawyer filed a motion arguing that Jarrells could not be put to death because he was intellectually disabled. After a hearing, a judge agreed the issue needed to be considered further. The judge remanded Jarrells' case to the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit for a new trial to determine if he was, in fact, intellectually disabled. In 2014, District Attorney Herbert "Buzz" Franklin told the Times Free Press the process was taking decades for many reasons. In part, he said, because these cases are complicated, with a number of pretrial hearings. Franklin, who became district attorney in 1997, added that for years he couldn't figure out who Jarrells' attorney was. He said that in 2007 he began contacting the Georgia Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps death row inmates find attorneys. Franklin said the group didn't call him back for years. According to the consent order signed Friday, the attorneys on both sides of the case agreed that Jarrells was intellectually disabled based primarily on an evaluation from Dr. George Baroff, who met with Jarrells before his 1991 hearing in Butts County. Baroff administered a couple of intelligence tests to Jarrells, concluding that his IQ was 69. He said educators in West Virginia who evaluated Jarrells as a student found the same results. He functioned at the level of a 9-year-old. Sarah Gerwig-Moore, a law professor at Mercer University, said Jarrells is likely eligible for parole because the state will treat him under the laws of 1988, not today's. While a defendant convicted of murder would not be eligible for parole until after 30 years in prison now, back in the 1980s that same defendant would be eligible after 7 years.