Terry Lee Hankins was a 26-year-old auto mechanic from the Fort Worth area when, at the end of August 2001, police in Tarrant County charged him with capital murder in the deaths of his estranged wife, Tammy Hankins, and her two children, Kevin and Ashley, in Mansfield, Texas. He was tried only for the deaths of the two children. In May 2002 a Tarrant County jury convicted him of capital murder, and his punishment was set at death. After his arrest Hankins also told police that he had killed his father and his half-sister the year before. Those two deaths, and the death of his wife, never went to a verdict. On June 2, 2009, Hankins was executed in Huntsville. It was the 16th execution in Texas that year and the 200th since Rick Perry became governor.
Hankins was born on October 10, 1974. Court records place his childhood partly in Oklahoma, where he lived with his father before the two moved to Texas. By 2001 he had taken over his father's towing and automotive business, and he worked as an auto mechanic.
At the sentencing phase his defense lawyers called witnesses who spoke of mistreatment in his childhood and of the likelihood that he would behave well if he were given a life sentence. A federal court later noted that his trial lawyers had chosen not to present a psychological evaluation, because the examiner's findings were negative and might have given the State a way to offer rebuttal evidence.
Tammy Hankins was 34. Her children, Ashley and Kevin, were 11 and 12 or 13 years old. Hankins had recently been released from jail and was living with them in Mansfield, a town south of Fort Worth.
Tammy Hankins died in Mansfield on August 26, 2001, and the two children died there on the next day, August 27.
Hankins was arrested in Arlington on Thursday, August 30, 2001. He was arraigned that afternoon and gave a written statement afterward. He was charged with capital murder in the deaths of Tammy Hankins, then 34, and the two children. Sheila Wynn prosecuted the case.
In the days after the arrest Hankins told Arlington police that he had killed his father and his half-sister the previous year. The charging documents quoted at the time placed the half-sister's death on October 1, 2000, and the father's about a week later. Police confirmed both deaths on Friday, August 31, 2001. Neither death was the subject of a trial. Hankins's father had run an automotive business in the area, and Hankins had taken it over; the half-sister was 20.
Whether any charge was ever filed in the deaths of the father and half-sister has not been reported. The State chose to try Hankins in 2002 only for the deaths of the two children, and that it offered the other deaths as evidence at the sentencing phase.
The case was tried in Criminal District Court Number 4 of Tarrant County, under Cause No. 0817624D. A jury convicted Hankins of capital murder in May 2002, and the trial court entered judgment on May 16, 2002. Hankins did not testify.
At the sentencing phase the State presented evidence of the other deaths, in the autumn of 2000 and in August 2001. The Texas capital sentencing statute then asked the jury two questions, whether Hankins would be a continuing danger and whether anything in his background or circumstances called for a sentence of life instead of death. The jury's answers led to a sentence of death. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice received Hankins on May 20, 2002.
The conviction and sentence went to the Court of Criminal Appeals. In Hankins v. State, No. 74,369, the court affirmed the judgment on April 21, 2004, in a published opinion by Judge Meyers, with Presiding Judge Keller concurring in part and Judge Womack concurring. Hankins had raised five points of error. He argued that the trial judge had restricted questioning of prospective jurors on several subjects, that the jury should have been told the State carried the burden of proof on the mitigation question, that the jury should have been told about parole, that the mitigation question was unconstitutional without a burden of proof, that a pretrial hearing on how prosecutors decide to seek death had been wrongly refused, and that the affidavit supporting his arrest warrant did not show probable cause. The court overruled all of them. On the last point it held the affidavit insufficient but found that the connection to his later statement was too weak to require that it be set aside. The Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari in 2004.
A state application for a writ of habeas corpus had been filed in January 2004. In September 2004 the trial court adopted the State's findings of fact and conclusions of law and recommended that relief be denied, and on November 10, 2004, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied relief in an unpublished order, Ex parte Hankins, No. 60,227-01.
Hankins then petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division (Case No. 4:04-cv-00875-Y). His main claim was that his trial lawyers had failed to investigate and present the childhood evidence and a psychological evaluation. He also challenged the instruction on mitigation, the admission of photographs and of medical testimony, the lack of a burden of proof on the mitigation question, the absence of a parole instruction, the quashing of his subpoenas to district attorneys, and the way the state carries out sentences.
In a memorandum opinion signed March 30, 2007, the district court set aside the argument that the claims were procedurally barred, took up each ground on its merits and denied the petition and his request for an evidentiary hearing. It found that much of the childhood evidence had already reached the jury through other witnesses, that the rest could have come only from witnesses he chose not to call, and that, given the strength of the evidence against him, there was no reasonable probability of a sentence of life.
The Fifth Circuit took up his request for a certificate of appealability in Hankins v. Quarterman, No. 07-70015. On August 15, 2008, in an unpublished per curiam opinion by Judges Davis, Barksdale and Benavides, it denied the certificate. It held that his lawyers' choices fell within a reasonable range of trial strategy and that more mitigation evidence would not likely have changed the sentence, that the mitigation instruction did not violate the Constitution, and that circuit precedent foreclosed his arguments on the burden of proof and on how the state carries out death sentences. The court wrote that additional evidence "would not have made a difference."
After the Fifth Circuit's ruling Hankins had no execution date. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles later refused his petition for clemency, and his lawyer, William Harris, said before the execution that the appeals were exhausted.
Hankins was executed in Huntsville on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. He was 34. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice numbers it the 439th execution carried out in the state, and it was the 16th of 2009. Amnesty International counted it as the 200th execution in Texas under Governor Perry, who took office in December 2000.
Under section 19.03(a)(7) of the Texas Penal Code a person commits capital murder by murdering more than one person during the same criminal transaction, or during different transactions if the murders are committed under the same scheme or course of conduct. Section 19.03(b) classes the offense as a capital felony. The two deaths of August 27, 2001, fall within the first of those alternatives.
After a capital murder conviction the jury answers the special questions set out in Article 37.071 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, on future danger and on mitigation, and a sentence of death rests on its answers. In Hankins's case the sentence passed through direct appeal, state habeas review and federal habeas review. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act a federal court defers to the state courts unless their rulings were contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law, or rested on unreasonable findings of fact. The district court applied that standard in 2007, and it is the reason the federal review turned on whether the state courts' conclusions were reasonable and not on whether the federal judges would have decided differently.
Hankins was convicted of two deaths. The figure of five family members rests on his statements to police and on the punishment-phase evidence, not on five verdicts. The deaths of his wife, his father and his half-sister were not tried.
The childhood that the defense described to the jury is the account given by Hankins and the witnesses who spoke for him. The courts treated it as mitigation evidence and made no finding on it.
October 10, 1974: Terry Lee Hankins is born.
Autumn 2000: By his own statement to police, Hankins kills his half-sister and then his father.
August 26, 2001: Tammy Hankins dies in Mansfield, Texas.
August 27, 2001: Her two children, Kevin and Ashley, die in Mansfield.
August 30, 2001: Hankins is arrested in Arlington and is arraigned the same afternoon.
August 31, 2001: Police confirm the deaths of his father and half-sister; he is charged with capital murder in the deaths of his wife and her two children.
May 2002: A Tarrant County jury convicts him of capital murder; judgment is entered May 16, 2002, with a sentence of death.
May 20, 2002: He is received by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
January 2004: State habeas application filed.
April 21, 2004: The Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and sentence.
2004: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
November 10, 2004: The Court of Criminal Appeals denies state habeas relief.
March 30, 2007: The federal district court denies habeas relief.
August 15, 2008: The Fifth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability.
June 2, 2009: Hankins is executed in Huntsville.