Despite being just 20 years old, J.W. Ledford had been drinking and using drugs half his life when he murdered his 73-year-old neighbor Dr. Harry Johnston on Jan. 31, 1992.
According to testimony at the trial in Murray County, Ga., Antoinette Johnston had just seen her husband drive away in his pickup with someone in the passenger seat when Ledford knocked on the door and asked to speak with the physician. Read More ↓
Ledford left when she told him her husband wasn’t home, but he returned a short while later to ask Antoinette to tell her husband to come to his house that evening.
Not long after that, Ledford came back again, this time carrying a knife that belonged to the elderly man. Ledford told Antoinette Johnston he needed money for drugs, and if he didn’t get it he would kill her. He tied up the woman and left the house with two handguns, a rifle and a shotgun that belonged to the family. She was able to free herself in time to see Ledford drive off in her husband’s truck.
Within 30 minutes, Ledford had sold the rifle and shotgun at two different pawnshops, stopped to buy cigarettes and was stopped on Highway 441 and arrested.
After his arrest, Ledford confessed to killing Harry Johnston, described in court records as "rather feeble". He told investigators that he had gone to the doctor’s house to ask the doctor for a ride to the grocery store, and they left together. During the drive, the older man accused Ledford of stealing and turned the truck around to head back to his house. On the side of the Johnston garage, Ledford said, Johnston knocked him to the ground and then pulled a knife from a sheath in his belt. Ledford said he pulled his own knife and repeatedly stabbed Johnson. The doctor’s body was found near the Johnstons’ garage.
While his initial appeal challenged the jury and comments prosecutors made at trial, the issue that was presented once Ledford's case was appealed to the federal courts was whether or not he was intellectually disabled.
Experts for Ledford said he had been damaged by years of abusing alcohol and drugs, starting when he was a boy, and that was compounded by several head injuries.
His experts said Ledford's score on varous IQ tests ranged from as low as 65 to as high as 79, just barely over the line of demarcation of 70. At the same time, experts for the state found Ledford scored much higher in their testing.
According to a decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Ledford "possessed adequate literacy skills with some specific difficulty in arithmetic, where he functions below what would ordinarily be expected.”
The court wrote that while Ledford's intellect was lower than what is considered normal, it was not so low that he was ineligible for a death sentence.