Vets With PTSD Should Be Exempt From Death Penalty, Legal Experts Say

Vets With PTSD Should Be Exempt From Death Penalty, Legal Experts Say

On January 12, 1998, Andrew Brannan was driving his truck at 98 miles an hour on a country road near his Dublin, Georgia, home when he was pulled over by Deputy Kyle Dinkheller. Brannan, a white-haired, 66-year-old man, got out of his truck, shouted profanities, and danced around, yelling, "Here I am, here I am ... [s]hoot me." He then attacked the deputy and a gunfight ensued, in which Brannan shot Dinkheller nine times with a rifle.

Video footage from the deputy's dashboard camera inflamed public opinion. Dinkheller was 22 years old and married, with one child and another baby on the way. Brannan received a death sentence and, on January 13, became the first person executed in 2015. But Joseph Loveland, an Atlanta-based attorney who tried to commute Brannan's sentence to life imprisonment without parole, says the jury and sentencing judge never heard the whole story.

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