Clinton Bankston Jr. was a teenager in Athens, Georgia, when five people died there on two separate dates in 1987. A Clarke County grand jury indicted him that September for the murders and other crimes. In May 1988 he pleaded "guilty but mentally ill" to five counts of malice murder and was sentenced to five consecutive life terms. The five deaths fell on two dates about four months apart, and he was still a minor throughout.
His date of birth and his family background are not on record. He was 15 when two of the victims died and 16 when the other three died, and he had not reached his seventeenth birthday when any of the offenses occurred. He was 16 when police first spoke with him in August 1987.
Glenn Sutton and Rachel Sutton, a married couple in Athens, died in April 1987. They were the first of the five people for whom Bankston was later convicted. They had one son. The circumstances of their deaths are not on record.
Police questioned more than 300 people over the summer of 1987, and in August they asked the FBI for help. The case remained open through those months, until the August deaths.
In August 1987, about four months after the Suttons, three more people died in Athens: Ann Morris, 63; her sister Sally Nathanson, 59; and Sally Nathanson's daughter Helen Nathanson, 22. Bankston was 16 by then.
He was taken into custody in Athens in August 1987. The indictment followed in September 1987, charging him with the murders of five persons and with other crimes.
The State of Georgia gave notice that it would seek the death penalty. Bankston's lawyers moved before trial to bar it, and the trial court denied the motion. They took an interlocutory appeal to the Supreme Court of Georgia, arguing that because he had not reached his seventeenth birthday when any offense was committed, a Georgia statute ruled out a death sentence.
The court decided the appeal on April 20, 1988, in an opinion by Chief Justice Marshall, with every justice concurring. It reversed the trial court. The question was how to read the statute, which said that when a person convicted of a capital offense had not reached his seventeenth birthday at the time of the offense, the punishment "shall not be death but shall be imprisonment for life." Part of the statute spoke of capital cases "other than those of homicide," and after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1977 ruling in Coker v. Georgia homicide was the only class of capital case left, so a narrow reading would have left the provision with no effect. The court held that the legislature had intended a general bar on executing anyone under seventeen at the time of the offense, and noted that criminal statutes are read strictly against the State and that the lesser penalty applies where a penalty statute can be read two ways.
On May 13, 1988, Bankston pleaded "guilty but mentally ill" to five counts of malice murder in Clarke County. The other charges in the indictment were nolle prossed. He was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences.
In April 2019, more than thirty years after the plea, Bankston, representing himself, filed a motion in Clarke County headed as a motion to vacate a void judgment of conviction. In substance he sought to set aside the convictions and to withdraw his guilty pleas. He argued that his plea lawyer had been constitutionally ineffective, that the trial court had not given him the benefit of certain juvenile court processes and protections, and that the court had not properly inquired into his mental competency.
The Chief Judge of the Western Judicial Circuit, H. Patrick Haggard, denied the motion to the extent it sought to vacate the convictions, rejecting on the merits the claim that they were void, and dismissed it to the extent it sought to withdraw the pleas, because the request was untimely and the court lacked jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court of Georgia decided the appeal on January 13, 2020, in an opinion by Justice Warren, with all justices concurring. It affirmed in part, vacated in part and remanded. A motion to vacate a conviction, it held, is not an appropriate remedy in a criminal case and is a nullity, so the trial court should have dismissed that part of the motion instead of denying it on the merits; the court sent the case back with direction to dismiss and added that no appeal would be available from that dismissal. A trial court has no jurisdiction to allow withdrawal of a guilty plea after the term of court in which the defendant was sentenced has ended, and because the 1988 term had expired decades earlier, that part of the motion had been properly dismissed. The five life sentences stood.
In September 2022, thirty-five years after the deaths, Bankston remained in prison in Georgia, serving his life sentences.
In September 2022 Athens marked thirty-five years since the deaths.
No other killings have been charged, confessed or attributed to Bankston.
April 1987: Glenn Sutton and Rachel Sutton die in Athens, Georgia; Bankston is 15.
Summer 1987: police question more than 300 people and later ask the FBI for help.
August 1987: Ann Morris, Sally Nathanson and Helen Nathanson die in Athens; Bankston, 16, is taken into custody.
September 1987: a Clarke County grand jury indicts him for the murders of five persons and other crimes.
April 20, 1988: the Supreme Court of Georgia rules that the death penalty cannot apply because he had not reached his seventeenth birthday.
May 13, 1988: he pleads "guilty but mentally ill" to five counts of malice murder; five consecutive life sentences.
April 2019: he files a pro se motion to vacate the convictions and withdraw the pleas.
January 13, 2020: the Supreme Court of Georgia affirms in part, vacates in part and remands; the sentences stand.
September 2022: still in prison serving life.