Update: Jennifer Long sentenced to life without parole for slamming baby against table

Update: Judge Ron Mullins sentenced Jennifer Long to life without parole Monday afternoon.

Long received life without parole for malice murder, into which the felony murder charge merges. She also was sentenced to 20 years for first-degree cruelty to children, but that's to be concurrent with the murder sentence.

Original story: Jurors found Jennifer Long guilty Dec. 11 of slamming her 18-month-old adopted daughter against a changing table, causing a fatal brain injury.

The jury deliberated about two hours and 20 minutes before finding Long guilty of murder and first-degree child cruelty. Judge Ron Mullins set her sentencing for 2 p.m. Dec. 21.

During closing arguments Friday morning, defense attorney Tim Flournoy urged jurors to consider convicting his client on the lesser offense of involuntary manslaughter, claiming Long did not intend to kill the girl even if her actions resulted in the fatal injury.

Long claimed the child only fell from the changing table, which is about three feet high. A doctor testified a fall from so low a height was unlikely to cause such severe trauma, which was consistent with someone falling five stories or being involved in a head-on car collision.

Flournoy told jurors that doesn’t mean Long’s scenario is impossible: “It may be unusual; it may be strange, but strange things happen,” he said.

In his closing, Assistant District Attorney George Lipscomb gave a dramatic demonstration of how much force must have been used to cause such “catastrophic” injury, taking a foam doll and slamming it down on the changing table in the courtroom.

As he did so, he pointed out aspects of the law he said fit his contention that what Long did was outright murder, not involuntary manslaughter resulting from carelessness.

He said the element of premeditation is not required for jurors to find Long guilty of malice or deliberate murder, citing the law as he said, “Intent may be inferred from the consequences of the act,” and smashed the doll on the table.

The act alone may be evidence of “an abandoned and malignant heart,” he said, slamming the doll against the table again.

The act also may be evidence of malice “no matter how short in time” the malice existed, so even spur-of-the-moment passion justifies a murder conviction, he said, again smacking the doll on the table.

He continued, saying Long’s testimony that the baby fell off the table was not believable, and noting that doctors said older injuries indicated the girl had been beaten before. Then he hit the table with his fist, smashing the entire top in.

The wooden table already had been in bad shape, its broken surface showing where Lipscomb told jurors Long slammed toddler Alexis Long’s head against it.

Flournoy objected to Lipscomb’s destroying a trial exhibit, saying its condition was no longer as initially presented, so the jury should not be allowed to view the broken table during deliberations.

Lipscomb agreed, saying jurors would be able to examine photographs of the table as it originally was shown to them.

Because pre-existing injuries indicated she’d been beaten before, the child’s fatal trauma on Jan. 29, 2012, was not an isolated incident, but the ultimate consequence of a pattern of abuse, Lipscomb said.

Long and her husband said the family that Sunday morning in 2012 had left Columbus for Griffin, Ga., where Long grew up, and where her part-time pastor spouse was to preach. Alexis that day was in good spirits, happy to see relatives and meet new people.

But the child got fussy on the way home, and started crying when they got back to Columbus about 3 or 3:30 p.m. As Long took the child inside to change her diaper, the husband went back to the car to put a pair of glasses in it.

He said that while he was outside, he heard a loud “bang,” like furniture being moved, and when he went back in, his wife told him, “Something’s wrong with Alexis.” He called 911, and an ambulance rushed the child to the Midtown Medical Center, where physicians had her flown by helicopter to a pediatric trauma center in Atlanta.

Brain dead, the toddler died the following Monday when her life support was removed.

Long over those two days repeatedly said she had no idea how the child was injured. Finally, after detectives here questioned her almost four hours, she told them she hadn’t realized she set the baby on the changing table with such force.

But while testifying Thursday, she said the baby fell off the changing table while she wasn’t looking.

Her attorney in his closing said his client’s husband was the more likely culprit, as evidenced by Timothy Long’s cutting ties with his wife of 14 years as soon as he was released from jail on charges of second-degree child cruelty, a misdemeanor alleging he failed to report child abuse.

After his release, he stopped communicating with his wife and her family, changing his telephone number and the locks on his house. “There’s something about Pastor Long that ain’t right,” Flournoy said.

Recalling a doctor’s testifying to finding injuries indicating “an ongoing pattern of abuse” that may have included beating the girl with a ruler and with a plastic coat hanger, Flournoy said, “Somebody was abusing that child.” It must have been Timothy Long, he said.

Lipscomb countered that no one, including Jennifer Long and relatives who spoke in her defense, testified to seeing Timothy Long mistreat the baby.

Flournoy told the jury that when detectives interviewed his client for almost four hours the night of Jan. 30, 2012, she had not slept since 8 a.m. the previous day. She was questioned until midnight, so she went about 36 hours with no rest.

He maintained police simply wore Jennifer Long down until she said what they wanted to hear. They at times got right up in her face and yelled.

That was abusive, Flournoy said: “They don’t beat you with rubber hoses anymore, but they browbeat you.” Jurors should consider whether such intimidation resulted in a statement Jennifer Long gave “freely and voluntarily,” he said.

He also referred to character witnesses who said Jennifer Long never had a short temper, and had avoided confrontations all her life, even with her siblings when she was a child.

“She was mild and meek,” he said. “She doesn’t have a mean gene in her DNA, and she would not intentionally harm this child.”

Lipscomb countered that Jennifer Long’s character witnesses were all friends or relatives who don’t live here, so they could not have known how the mother treated the child day to day.

They could testify only to her reputation, not to her actual character, he said.

“She’s taken everything away from this child,” Lipscomb concluded. “It’s time this child had justice.”

This story was originally published December 11, 2015 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Update: Jennifer Long sentenced to life without parole for slamming baby against table."