ABSTRACT
In 1994, Stephen Mobley was sentenced for a murder he committed at a Domino’s Pizza in Oakwood, GA. The case would have been unmemorable except for the novel defense brought about by his legal team which, for the first time in modern-era jurisprudence, argued that their client’s genetic makeup should mitigate his culpability for the crime (Levitt and Manson, 2007). The defense was unsuccessful, but this fact did not stop defense attorneys from attempting to use it with over 200 American and 20 British cases having some sort of genetic argument over the last five years (Feresin, 2009). These cases have all met the same fate as Mobley, but that changed with two rulings in 2009. The first was an Italian case where a court knocked four years off defendant Abdelmalek Bayout’s 12-year murder sentence on the basis of test results showing he possessed five genetic polymorphisms indicative of violent behavior (Feresin, 2009). The second was in Tennessee where evidence provided by the defense indicated that a genotype linked to low levels of monoamine oxidase (MAO-A) expression might have been partially responsible for Bradley Waldroup’s 2006 violent killing spree, which heavily influenced the jurors’ decision to convict him of manslaughter instead of capital murder (Bradley-Haggerty, 2010). With the floodgates now open, it is only a matter of time before defense attorneys around the globe, citing the Bayout and Waldroup cases as precedents, press for similar reductions for their clients.
