Miller's attorneys detail his childhood — a hellish upbringing rife with sexual abuse, beatings and addiction
In an interview with a clinical psychologist in 2002, David Earl Miller — the man set to be executed in Tennessee's electric chair on Dec. 6 — described a recurring nightmare he'd had during his years on death row.
"I'm at my execution, strapped to the gurney so I can't move at all, and my step-father is present," Miller told Dr. David Lisak, a clinical psychologist, according to documents included in Miller's application for clemency. "I see him sitting in the viewing gallery. I don't see any expression on his face, but I hear him say this to me: 'I hope you have nightmares about this you sorry bastard!'"
Lisak notes: "It is as though Mr. Miller fully expects to be tormented by his step-father right through to the final seconds of his life."
As for nightmares, Miller has plenty of those.
That illness, and all those years of abuse, were critical factors, they argue, that led to Miller's actions on May 20, 1981 — the night he murdered Lee Standifer, a Knoxville woman he'd been dating. The killing was brutal. According to court documents, Miller struck Standifer multiple times with a fireplace poker, killing her, and stabbed her dead body at least six times. One stabbing appeared to have occurred with such force that the state’s medical examiner suggested the knife might have been driven into Standifer’s body with a hammer. Miller was 24 years old at the time.
He was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to death. But in making the case for clemency, his attorneys argue that things would not have ended that way today.
They write that “David Miller accepts responsibility for the death of his friend,” but that he should not be executed.
"If this case were tried today, David would not be sentenced to death and it is likely he would not even be convicted of first degree murder," they write. "David’s guilt was determined in 1982 — before the Supreme Court decided in a landmark case, Ake v. Oklahoma, that it wasn’t fair to try an indigent, mentally ill, citizen for a capital crime without giving him a mental health expert to explain to his jury how mental illness might have been the cause of the crime. Although David’s trial attorney requested an expert for that purpose, and attempted to present a mental health defense, expert assistance was denied because the law did not require funding for a defense expert."
When he was resentenced later, his attorney failed to even attempt to present expert testimony about Miller's mental illness and his mental state at the time of the murder. All that, his attorneys today argue, left juries without a host of mitigating information to weigh against his crime and the sentence of death.
The two decades that preceded the night Miller murdered Standifer consisted of Miller suffering nearly constant abuse and neglect, according to court records: His mother, Loretta, drank heavily while he was in the womb, and his stepfather was a violent, abusive man. In his report, included in the clemency application, Lisak writes that Miller's earliest memories are of being beaten by his stepfather.
In one incident recounted in multiple court documents, Miller's stepfather is said to have “knocked David out of a chair, hit him with a board, threw him into a refrigerator with such force it dented the refrigerator and bloodied David’s head, dragged him through the house by his hair, and twice ran David’s head through the wall.”
Lisak also writes that Miller recalls being 4 or 5 when his older cousin tried to have sexual intercourse with him.
By the time he was 10 years old, Miller had twice attempted to kill himself — attempts that apparently prompted little response or efforts at intervention by his parents. It was around that same age that Miller began experiencing seizures and, Lisak writes, “recurrent episodes of loss of contact with reality." He began drinking and, soon after, using harder drugs.
In the years that followed, Miller was sexually assaulted by one of his grandfather's friends, and repeatedly by his mother until he was removed from her home in 1972 by the local Department of Human Services.
His mother's abuse was not just sexual. According to documents in the clemency application, Miller's mother also beat him, whipping him with a belt, an extension cord, a wire coat hanger and an umbrella. He told mental health professionals hired by his attorneys that he did not remember a single time his mother said she loved him.
Lisak, who evaluated Miller in 2002, recounts in his report how he first learned of Miller's history of childhood sexual abuse. During an interview, Lisak confronted Miller about an incident in 1973, when he allegedly attempted to rape his mother at knifepoint at age 16.
“When I confronted Mr. Miller about this incident he immediately became extremely agitated and tense," Lisak writes. "When I pressed him for an explanation of why he assaulted his mother, of why he would attempt to rape her, he began to literally vibrate with anger, his face turned a vivid red, and he seemed very close to simply exploding with rage. Instead, he blurted out the following words: 'I bet she didn't tell you who started all that!' I asked him what he meant by 'all of that.' He yelled, 'It was she that started all that, not me!!' I again asked him what he meant by 'all of that.' He then became even more agitated, began to get up out of his chair, and finally started demonstrating something with his hands while his face was contorted with rage and pain and he couldn't find words to say. Finally he said, 'having me dance with her, and putting my hand here (he demonstrated his hand at his mother's breast) and putting my hand there (he demonstrates his hand at his mother's genitals).' At this point Mr. Miller's breathing was so fast and his face so flushed that I gave him several moments to calm down.”
Miller would go on to disclose that his mother had forced him to have sexual intercourse with her on at least three occasions. Years later, Miller was
himself accused of rape on two separate occasions but saw the charges dropped when the women involved declined to participate in the prosecutions.
It is that all-consuming rage, laced by severe mental illness including psychotic episodes, that his attorneys and medical experts argue led to his murder of Standifer.
Lisak writes: "[Miller] was never able to adapt successfully to adult life. While he made some fledgling attempts to do so, those efforts were ultimately undone by his meager reservoir of coping resources, by the tragic death of his grandfather, and by the deep wellspring of rage that he harbored. This rage, that was periodically directed at women and that ultimately was directed at Lee Standifer, stemmed directly from the incestuous abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, and from the brutal physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father."
Haslam has declined to grant clemency to two condemned prisoners this year, and shown no signs that he would be inclined to do so. Barring intervention from the governor, or from a court, Miller will be led to the electric chair around 7 p.m. Thursday night. After one final episode of violence, the nightmares — for him, at least — will cease.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
