After 12 years in jail, case dismissed against Columbus couple convicted in baby’s death
An Army couple convicted of killing their newborn daughter is free for the first time in 12 years after their case was dismissed Tuesday — more than a year after the Georgia Supreme Court overturned their convictions.
The murder case against Albert and Ashley Debelbot in the 2008 death of their daughter, McKenzy, was dismissed Tuesday in Muscogee Superior Court at the behest of District Attorney Mark Jones.
The dismissal came more than a decade after a jury convicted them in 2009. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in February 2020 that the Debelbots’ defense attorneys were ineffective during the trial. The justices granted the couple a new trial.
Jones’ predecessor in office had planned to retry the case, before Jones won election last year. Jones took office in January and moved to dismiss the charges March 29.
Under questioning by Judge Arthur Smith III, Jones said Tuesday that he did not feel the evidence is sufficient to secure a guilty verdict in a new trial.
“I know what a case looks like that’s going to be ‘not guilty,’” Jones said, noting a defendant this year was acquitted in a case involving a child’s death.
He apologized to the Debelbots on behalf of the judicial circuit, saying they did not get a fair trial in 2009.
Smith noted the state Supreme Court had ruled the evidence was sufficient to support the conviction, though the defense was flawed.
Jones said the Supreme Court called the case a “close question,” so the outcome could have been different.
“If you want me to try it, I’ll try it,” Jones told Smith, “but my heart’s not in it, judge.”
Smith briefly recessed the court to consider the matter privately, then granted the motion to dismiss the charges.
Ashley Debelbot burst into tears.
The couple, who maintained their marriage while held miles apart in separate prisons, shared a long embrace as the court adjourned.
Albert Debelbot was 22 when he was jailed in his daughter’s death. He is 35 now.
Ashley Deone Debelbot, who was 24 when she went to prison, is now 36.
The reaction
Outside the courtroom, Ashley Debelbot said she appreciated Jones’ apology.
“Once you’ve been incarcerated, the word ‘sorry’ never comes to you, at all,” she told reporters, who squeezed in among the couple’s supporters in the lobby.
“I don’t hold any bitterness toward anybody,” she said. “I’m just glad that now, me and my husband can properly grieve for the daughter that we lost.”
The family didn’t have a funeral because McKenzy’s parents were in jail. Ashley Debelbot said her mother kept McKenzy’s ashes after the infant was cremated.
The Debelbots were arrested June 2, 2008, the day after their daughter died at Fort Benning’s Martin Army Hospital. They were not released until last July, when Smith granted them a bond, after the Supreme Court overturned their convictions.
Asked how the couple maintained their marriage while the state held them apart, Albert Debelbot could not hold back his outrage.
“The better question is, we lost 12 years being apart,” he said. “What is the state going to do for us?”
He said he and his wife served their country honorably before being charged in their daughter’s death.
“I joined the Army protecting the same freedom that was taken from me, without any crime or anything happening,” he said tearfully. “I believed in that. I lost a buddy in Iraq. ... We come home, but the same system that we won a war to protect would never protect us, our civil rights. This needs to be addressed.”
He served a year in Iraq, planning on a career, he said.
“My career was forfeited by this,” he said. “It never went anywhere, because of this. Ask questions about what’s going on with people like us. Why did we have to go through this?”
The background
Ashley and Albert Debelbot met in the Army and married in November 2007, before Albert was assigned in 2008 to the 4th Ranger Battalion School at Fort Benning, according to court records.
They moved to Columbus that March, looking forward to the baby they were expecting, Ashley Debelbot said.
McKenzy was born May 29, 2008, at Martin Army, and released about 12:30 p.m. on May 30. The Debelbots brought her home to their apartment on Buena Vista Road.
They said they found a lump on the baby’s forehead early on June 1, and took her back to Martin Army about 1:30 a.m. McKenzy was pronounced dead there at 3:55 a.m.
A state medical examiner conducting an autopsy June 2 said she found fractures to the right side of McKenzy’s head and concluded the infant died from “blunt force head trauma,” either by a series of blows to the head or “a crushing type of injury.”
The injuries occurred only hours before her death, said the examiner, who called it a homicide and “an intentional act.”
The Debelbots were questioned and arrested, based on the autopsy and the infant’s having been only in her parents’ care. They were indicted for murder and first-degree cruelty to children in June 2009.
They were tried together from Oct. 26 to Oct. 29, 2009, though Ashley Debelbot’s lawyer later said he was not given sufficient time to prepare or to get a medical expert to court to rebut the state’s evidence.
Albert Debelbot’s attorney declined to call an expert witness, as his strategy was to blame Ashley alone for McKenzy’s death, and tout Albert’s good character and Army service.
That tactic was aided by testimony from a jail cellmate who claimed Albert told him Ashley had “spanked” the infant while he was not home.
The jury found both Albert and Ashley Debelbot guilty, and Judge Doug Pullen sentenced them to life in prison.
Attorneys: Parents not to blame
Defense attorneys since have argued that McKenzy was born with a brain deformation, and died after suffering a stroke. Neither parent was to blame for that, they said.
Attorney James Anderson emphasized that point again Tuesday, after the hearing: The defense experts found McKenzy had a blood clot in her brain either before or during her birth, and it kept her skull from fully forming, as she bled internally. Her delivery was difficult, worsening the circumstances, but she had no fractures, Anderson said.
One doctor said the child would have died within the same time span, even if she hadn’t left the hospital, the attorney said, so the Debelbots’ charges were not dismissed merely “on a technicality.”
Among the organizations representing the couple were the state and local public defender’s office, the Wisconsin Innocence Project and the Georgia Innocence Project. Attorney Andrew Fleischman spoke for the defense Tuesday.
In the Debelbots’ appeals seeking a new trial, the defense brought in four expert witnesses. The prosecution had two medical experts testify in support of the state medical examiner’s conclusions.
Judge Smith dismissed the defense arguments in December 2017, saying the witnesses were not credible and their evidence was inadmissible. But the Georgia Supreme Court rejected that on appeal, sending the case back to Columbus in March 2019 on the grounds that Smith did not offer sufficient reasons for discrediting the defense testimony.
The court felt then that the evidence was sufficient to sustain the convictions, though the justices acknowledged the case was circumstantial, and in some aspects “underwhelming.”
Smith later elaborated on his reasoning for denying the couple a new trial, and the Debelbots appealed to the state Supreme Court again.
GA Supreme Court rules
On Feb. 28, 2020, the court threw out the convictions altogether, but that decision was not based on any expert testimony. The justices unanimously decided that the defense attorneys were deficient in failing to object during the closing argument, when the prosecutor reduced the burden of proof from beyond a reasonable doubt.
“You don’t have to be 90 percent sure. You don’t have to be 80 percent sure. You don’t have to be 51 percent sure,” Assistant District Attorney Sadhana Dailey told jurors.
The Debelbots’ defense attorneys, Bill Mason for Albert and William “Sandy” Callahan for Ashley, did not object, leaving the jury to apply that measure to the prosecution’s burden of proof.
“The Debelbots have shown a reasonable probability that, but for the failure of their lawyers to object during closing argument to the gross misstatement of the law by the prosecuting attorney, the outcome of their trial would have been different,” the Supreme Court wrote in granting the couple a new trial.
Then-District Attorney Julia Slater said she would retry the case, but she lost the election last year to Jones. Jones later said he found the evidence insufficient to prove the Debelbots’ guilt.
Albert Omenged Debelbot started serving his life sentence on Dec. 21, 2009, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections.
Ashley Deone Debelbot started serving her sentence on Dec. 16, 2009, records show.
This story was originally published April 13, 2021 at 4:42 PM.