1. Doyle Lee Hamm was an American death row inmate in Alabama, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1987 murder of Patrick Cunningham, whom he killed while committing a robbery.
18 Facts About Doyle Hamm
1. 2.
Doyle Hamm remained in prison until his death from cancer-related complications in 2021.
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Doyle Hamm was born on February 14,1957, and grew up in northwest Alabama, the tenth of twelve children.
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Tests and report cards indicated that, in the fifth grade, Doyle Hamm was still reading at a first-grade level.
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Doyle Hamm dropped out of school during the ninth grade and began abusing drugs and alcohol.
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At the age of twenty, Doyle Hamm was arrested and charged with robbery after a drunken fight in a bar parking lot.
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Doyle Hamm entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to five years in prison.
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On January 24,1987, Doyle Hamm went on a crime spree that culminated in a motel robbery at the Anderson Motel in Cullman, Alabama, and the murder of Patrick Cunningham, a nighttime clerk at the motel.
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Additionally, evidence that Doyle Hamm suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and that he had an IQ of only 66 was not presented to the jury.
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The defense counsel's failure to present this evidence to the jury became the subject of subsequent appeals, which raised the possibility that Doyle Hamm's attorney was so ineffective as to violate the Sixth Amendment.
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In February 2014, Doyle Hamm, who was still on death row, was diagnosed with lymphatic and cranial cancer.
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Doctors discovered a large malignant tumor behind his left eye and determined that Doyle Hamm suffered from B-cell lymphoma.
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Doyle Hamm underwent years of cancer treatment, including radiation therapy, but the treatments did not eliminate the cancer entirely and, by late 2017, Doyle Hamm's cancer had worsened.
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On January 31,2018, Chief Judge Karen O Bowdre issued a stay of execution, finding that Doyle Hamm had shown a substantial likelihood that he would suffer irreparable injury if the execution were to go forward.
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The Special Rapporteurs expressed concern that Doyle Hamm did not receive a fair trial.
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Doyle Hamm alleged that a second execution attempt would violate 42 USC.
17.
The events surrounding Alabama's attempt to execute Hamm were recounted in a Supreme Court brief that was filed in Bucklew v Precythe, a 2019 Supreme Court case concerning the death penalty.
18.
Doyle Hamm died in prison of cancer-related complications on November 28,2021, at the age of 64.