NAPLES — Court Reporter – Attorneys for Brandy Bain Jennings, the Naples man sentenced to death row for a 1995 triple homicide at a local Cracker Barrel restaurant, concluded a special hearing in his case inside a Collier courtroom on Wednesday.
With prosecutors, they’ll submit closing arguments to a Collier judge, who will choose if Jennings’ original case was flawed and merits another look.
The hearing follows Jennings’ petition for post-conviction relief due to ineffective counsel, a regular action in death penalty instances.
It might also represent 1 of his last opportunities to escape death row. The Florida Supreme Court denied his appeal in 1998, and also the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition to hear his situation the following year.
The evidentiary hearing, held before Collier Circuit Judge Fred Hardt, was continued from April, when testimony was taken for two days. Jennings was present both times, attentive and clad in an orange jumpsuit.
Wednesday morning, he listened as clinical psychologist Faye Sultan described the consequences of his chaotic upbringing. Raised amidst sexual abuse and moved often from point out to state, Jennings grew up without regular impulse control, Sultan stated.
He began drinking and doing drugs at an early age, producing him an overly sexualized substance abuser, Sultan stated.
“They don’t develop usually neurologically, and they don’t develop usually emotionally,” Sultan said.
Such an assessment of Jennings’ background should have been presented during his trial, his attorneys contend.
Jennings, 41, and his accomplice, Charles Jason Graves, 33, had been each convicted of three counts of capital murder and 1 count of robbery within the killings of Dorothy Siddle, 38, of Golden Gate; Vicki Smith, 27, of Copeland; and Jason Wiggins, 21, of East Naples throughout an early morning holdup at the restaurant on Collier Boulevard near Interstate 75.
The two former Cracker Barrel employees, Jennings and Graves bound their 3 victims and placed them inside a freezer on Nov. 15, 1995. Jennings, the state proved, then repeatedly slashed the throats from the victims, although Graves stood at the freezer door with a pellet gun to avoid their escape. They had planned the crime much more than a month ahead of time, hoping to snatch up to $15,000 in a simple parking lot robbery.
The two men were arrested in Las Vegas less than a month following the killings.
Jennings is being represented by Paul Kalil of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel. Assistant Point out Attorney Richard Montecalvo represented the state within the hearing, with assist from Assistant Attorney General Carol Dittmar.
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