On January 12, 1998, Andrew Brannan was driving his truck at 98 miles an hour on a country road near his Dublin, Georgia, home when he was pulled over by Deputy Kyle Dinkheller. Brannan, a white-haired, 66-year-old man, got out of his truck, shouted profanities, and danced around, yelling, “Here I am, here I am … [s]hoot me.” He then attacked the deputy and a gunfight ensued, in which Brannan shot Dinkheller nine times with a rifle.
Video footage from the deputy’s dashboard camera inflamed public opinion. Dinkheller was 22 years old and married, with one child and another baby on the way. Brannan received a death sentence and, on January 13, became the first person executed in 2015. But Joseph Loveland, an Atlanta-based attorney who tried to commute Brannan’s sentence to life imprisonment without parole, says the jury and sentencing judge never heard the whole story.
