Good Samaritan’s Death Sentence Voided

The state Supreme Court threw out the death sentence of a good Samaritan who saved two people’s lives, then wound up on death row for killing an elderly woman two years later.

The court ruled in Atlanta that William Marvin Gulley’s lawyers should have presented the evidence of his good deeds to jurors. Gulley will be resentenced for killing an 81-year-old Albany woman and raping her 60-year-old daughter in 1994.

“Whatever our own opinions may be about the sentencing verdict in this case ... there is a reasonable probability that evidence of Gulley’s having saved two persons’ lives, at risk to his own life, would have changed that sentencing verdict,” Justice George Carley wrote for a unanimous court.