Grady Nelson, a 53-year-old capital murder defendant whose past traumatic brain injury became a key mitigating circumstance during the penalty phase of his trial, will not have to face lethal injection on Florida’s death row.

The legal efforts of two University of Miami School of Law students have helped him avoid the death house.

As part of a new project that allows students to work closely with capital defense lawyers and, in some cases, argue before judges, Keon Hardemon and Paul Petrequin assisted Nelson’s team of lawyers in successfully securing a recommendation of life in prison.

After only an hour of deliberation in a Miami courtroom, jurors sided with Nelson’s defense team, which included attorneys Terry Lenamon, David S. Markus, and student supervisor and assistant professor Sarah Mourer, who entered the case pro bono as co-counsel.

The students conducted extensive research to assist in submitting QEEG [quantitative electroencephalography]—a three-dimensional brain image also known as brain mapping used to indicate traumatic brain injury. Lenamon says it’s the first time QEEG has been used in a death penalty case, and he believes it was the first time the technology was used in a Florida criminal case.

The verdict was unexpected owing to the violent nature of Nelson’s crime. A former social worker’s aide for the Miami-Dade Human Services Department, Nelson was convicted of stabbing his wife 61 times and stabbing her two young children in January 2005.

“Participation in a death case such as Mr. Nelson’s trial was a particularly remarkable experience for students due to the exceptionally heinous nature of the crime and the complexity of the defense team’s mitigation evidence,” said Mourer, who runs Miami Law’s Capital Defense Project, in which Hardemon and Petrequin are involved.

The Capital Defense Project is run in connection with the Florida Capital Resource Center, a nonprofit founded by Lenamon. A program such as this allows students to work on and even litigate capital punishment cases in Florida, which is the second largest death row state in the nation.

Mourer says the new Capital Defense Project at Miami Law is the only program to allow law students to work so closely with clients and capital defense attorneys, to provide students the opportunity to litigate death cases and have their voices heard in a real courtroom.

“The Capital Defense Project not only provides students with a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but it provides capital attorneys in the community much needed legal assistance,” said Mourer.

Students assisted Mourer with direct examinations and preparations for arguments, and they even argued motions to exclude the government’s statutory aggravators that juries use to justify death sentences. Given their client’s traumatic brain injury, chronic emotional trauma, and cocaine addiction, the case was rife with layers of complexity.

Hardemon was able to successfully argue to Judge Jacqueline Hogan-Scola the introduction of important jury instructions. “It was great that Keon was able to speak and argue in court,” said Lenamon. “Now he’s part of the record.”

The judge agreed with Hardemon’s argument.

“I would bet my life that he now feels better equipped at making his next argument as a student or as a lawyer,” said Hogan-Scola, who supports the Capital Defense Project. She would like to see more law schools focus on educating students more intensively from the courtroom instead of classroom. “It takes more than one run at something to really learn it.”