Phillip Workman

Philip Ray Workman (1 June 1953 – 9 May 2007) was a death row inmate executed in Tennessee on May 9, 2007. He was convicted in 1982 for the murder of a police officer following a robbery of a Wendy's restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Born on June 1, 1953 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Workman grew up with his parents on various Army bases. He later joined the Army. Shortly after his 1973 discharge, Workman was sentenced to 5 years in prison in Georgia for burglary and drug possession. He served 25 months.

In 1981, at 28 years old, Workman was living with his wife and 8-year-old daughter in Columbus, Georgia and was heavily addicted to cocaine. That summer, he hitchhiked to Memphis where, on August 5, 1981, he robbed a Wendy's restaurant with a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol.

During the robbery, an employee of the restaurant triggered a silent alarm after Workman granted her request to stand up to relieve a cramp in her leg. Three Memphis police officers, Ronald Oliver, Aubrey Stoddard, and Steven Parker, responded to the alarm. Upon their arrival, Workman attempted to flee across a nearby parking lot, then shot and killed Lt. Ronald Oliver.

Workman was charged with the murder of Lt. Oliver. At the 1982 trial, Officers Stoddard and Parker testified that they had not fired their weapons, but that they had not seen Workman shoot Lt. Oliver. The prosecution presented testimony from an alleged eyewitness, Harold Davis, who stated that he had parked his car in the restaurant car park and was three meters away when he saw Workman shoot Oliver. The defense lawyers accepted the police version, conducted no forensic or ballistics analysis and did not investigate Davis. At the sentencing phase of the trial, they presented no mitigating evidence, for example of the physical abuse Workman had suffered as a child, and his drug addiction as an adult. Workman was found guilty of murder during the commission of a felony by the jury (under the "felony murder" rule). The jury recommended a sentence of death, finding five statutory aggravating circumstances:

a) The defendant knowingly created a great risk of death to two (2) or more persons, other than the victim murdered, during the act of murder (Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-2-203(i)(3));

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