Man gets death for ‘02 killings`

A judge issued a rare Fulton County death sentence Wednesday for a man convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s 12-year-old son and her grandparents in a fit of rage more than six years ago.

Superior Court Judge John Goger sentenced 36-year-old De’Kelvin Martin to die minutes after emotional jurors announced, some in subdued voices, that they agreed death was appropriate punishment.

“Mr. Martin, I had hoped I would never have to do this,” Goger said.

Earlier this week the judge had subtly chastised Martin for rejecting District Attorney Paul Howard’s offer of life imprisonment without parole, saying the consequence could be “tragic.”

Martin’s lawyers, Maurice Kenner and Tom Clegg, said their client, who talked calmly with them after the sentence, was putting his future in God’s hands.

“He believes that God is going to intervene and that at some point he will be released from prison to spread the gospel,” Clegg said.

The defense attorneys contend Martin is schizoprhenic because he reports hearing voices and hallucinates. But Lance Cross, one of the prosecutors, said there is no “credible evidence” Martin is mentally ill.

The unmedicated Martin shows no outward signs of schizophrenia and no cellmates or guards reported him hallucinating or hearing voices, Cross said.

Martin is only the third person sentenced to death in Fulton County since Howard took office in 1999. Death sentences were given in 2000 to Gregory Lawler, convicted of killing a law enforcement officer, and last July to Demetrius Willis, who killed three people, including a child.

The district attorney suffered a stinging defeat in December when a jury could not unanimously agree on a sentence for courthouse shooter Brian Nichols, who killed four people, including a judge. Nichols, who was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, also relied on a mental-health defense.

Experts disagreed whether Martin was mentally ill now or at the killings. Dr. Darren Rothschild, a psychiatrist who testified for the defense, said Martin is mentally ill now and that in October 2002 his cocaine use possibly triggered a budding but undiagnosed paranoid psychosis that prompted him to stab to death the child, Savion Wright, and the boy’s great-grandparents, Travis Ivery, 83, and Ila Ivery, 77.

Prosecutor Shondeana Morris told jurors to consider Martin’s own words as a motive for the slaughter. His girlfriend, Tymika Wright, had refused his demands for sex after he came home after partying to the southwest Atlanta house where they were living with her grandparents, Morris said.

“He said, ‘I told you, I want sex and if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to kill everybody in this house,’ ” Morris told the jury.