Two years after announcing they would not pursue the death penalty against a man accused of killing an Indiana police officer, federal prosecutors are reversing course.
U.S. attorney Thomas E. Wheeler II filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Shane Meehan in U.S. District Court in Terre Haute on Tuesday.
Meehan is accused of killing detective and federal task force agent Gregory Ferency outside an FBI field office in Terre Haute in summer 2021.
Read more: U.S. won’t seek death for man accused of killing detective
“It is complete folly to pursue the death penalty in this case,” Meehan’s attorney Monica Foster said in an interview Wednesday. “This man suffers from terrible mental health problems, which have now been documented by the government’s own experts.”
Foster said that her client did not resemble a typical defendant in a death penalty case given his lack of a prior criminal history and otherwise stable life and career, including working as a guard for the penitentiary that houses federal death row.
Foster said Meehan medically retired from the U.S. prison bureau at age 40 due to significant medical and mental health problems.
“That's just not the typical person that you see charged with the unprovoked attack on a task force officer,” Foster said. “It's the complete, 180-degree turnaround of the typical person you see charged with that type of an offense.”
She said that Meehan had sustained chronic head injuries beginning in high school, when he played football. He also suffered blows to the head practicing mixed martial arts and from a motorcycle accident, Foster said.
“We have thousands and thousands of pages of medical and mental health records that were provided to the government” prior to the time the U.S. justice department made the decision not to seek death in 2022, Foster said.
“My thoughts go out to the Ferency family. It was an unprovoked attack,” Foster said. “But what has happened here is going to do nothing but cost the taxpayers a bunch of money and extend finality in this case for years and probably decades.”
Read more: Attorneys: Suspect in Indiana officer’s slaying mentally ill
Meehan’s non-capital trial was set to start next year but during a status conference Wednesday, both sides agreed that was no longer likely.
The notice filed Tuesday listed several factors to justify the death penalty, including that Ferency was a federal public servant engaged in the performance of his official duties, and that Meehan destroyed government property with explosives.
The Trump administration has sought to reverse decisions not to seek the death penalty across the country but judges have blocked most of those attempts.
