Two men who raped and killed two women after escaping a Kentucky jail will still face the death penalty, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said on Monday.
Brandon Basham, 43, and Chadrick Fulks, 47, kidnapped, raped, and killed Alice Donovan, 44, of Conway, South Carolina, and Samantha Burns, 19, of West Virginia, in November 2002.
According to court records, Basham and Fulks committed these killings during a 17-day crime spree following their escape from a Kentucky jail.
Before kidnapping, robbing, and killing Donovan and Burns, Basham and Fulks committed a variety of crimes, including carjacking a Kentucky man and tying him to a tree, stealing firearms in Indiana, and stealing a woman’s wallet in Ohio.
Authorities eventually apprehended the couple. Federal authorities charged them with carjacking, kidnapping, and using firearms during “crimes of violence,” among other offenses.
Fulks pleaded guilty to all charges in May 2004. A September 2004 trial found Basham guilty on all charges. Both prosecutors received death sentences for counts related to abduction and carjacking. They received 744-month sentences for the remaining crimes.
The appeals of both offenders were denied by the SC district court and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals shortly after their court procedures. In 2016, they requested a re-appeal based on several Supreme Court rulings, such as United States v. Taylor (2022), which declared that kidnapping was no longer considered “a violent crime.”
Basham and Fulks were granted an appeal in 2023, arguing that since abduction is no longer a serious crime, they should not face the death penalty for a crime related to it. They also claimed that carjacking isn’t a violent crime.
However, the Appeals Court maintains that carjacking is a violent crime by definition. Furthermore, the Court believes that the jury’s verdict in this case was not influenced by the kidnapping definition defense.
“Fulks and Basham carjacked Alice Donovan, kidnapped her in her own car, took her to a secluded cemetery, raped her, and killed her,” Monday’s Court opinion states. “Now they argue with supreme irony that they committed no “crime of violence.” They cling to the categorical approach as a life raft, asking us to ignore all of these facts. At a certain point in time, however, reality has a way of breaking through. The reality here is that appellants visited terror upon woman after woman.”
Basham and Fulks are two of the 40 federal death row convicts. Dylan Roof, who murdered nine people at a Charleston church in 2015, and Brandon Council, who killed two bank employees during a heist in 2017, are two additional South Carolina inmates on federal death row.
Three people convicted in North Carolina are on federal death row. They are Marcivicci Barnette, a Charlotte man who murdered his girlfriend and another man in Virginia in 1996; Richard Jackson, who raped and murdered a lady in the Pisgah National Forest in 1994; and Alejandro Umana, a Charlotte MS-13 gang member who murdered two people in Los Angeles in 2005.
A federal prison in Indiana houses Basham and Fulks.