SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
FREDERICK R. WHATLEY v. WARDEN, GEORGIA
DIAGNOSTIC AND CLASSIFICATION PRISON
ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED
STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 20–363. Decided April 19, 2021
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, dissenting from denial of certiorari.
A jury sentenced petitioner Frederick R. Whatley to
death the morning after watching him reenact a murder
while wearing unnecessary leg irons and manacles. When
the State called Whatley to the stand during the sentencing
proceeding, his attorney waved away the prosecutor’s concerns about the visible shackles, then sat silent when the
prosecutor handed Whatley a fake gun and asked him to
reenact the murder for which he had just been convicted.
Defense counsel’s unreasonable failure to object to Whatley’s shackling was plainly prejudicial under this Court’s
precedent. I would grant the petition, summarily reverse,
and remand for a new sentencing proceeding.
I
Following Whatley’s conviction for robbing and killing
the owner of a Georgia bait shop and liquor store, the State
asked the jury to impose a sentence of death. The sentencing proceeding involved just one day of evidence.
The State
relied on two, conceded statutory aggravating circumstances: Whatley committed the murder (1) during an
armed robbery, Ga. Code Ann. §17–10–30(b)(2) (Supp.
2019), and (2) after having “escaped from [a] place of lawful
confinement,” §17–10–30(b)(9), because he had walked
away from a halfway house to which he had been paroled a
few months earlier. The State further showed that Whatley
had prior convictions for forging a check....
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