JUST IN: 22-Year-Old Killer About to Be Executed for Murdering 6 Members of His Girlfriend’s Family. 

JUST IN: 22-Year-Old Killer About to Be Executed for Murdering 6 Members of His Girlfriend’s Family. 

There is a farm in Cshaw County, Alabama at a place called Moody’s Crossroads. It sits close to a small town named Rutledge, the kind of place where most people know each other by name and where a farmhouse and a trailer a few hundred ft apart can hold three generations of the same family.

 On the morning of August 26th, 2002, that farm looks the way it always looks. A house, a trailer nearby, a dog in the yard. Nothing about the quiet suggests anything is wrong. Inside the farmhouse, a 16-year-old girl named Janice is asleep. Her young daughter is beside her. It’s a little after 8:30 in the morning, and Janice wakes up because her bed is shaking.

 She hears a lock turn on the kitchen door. Then voices low, muffled. She can’t make out the words. Then she sees her grandmother walking back into the bedroom. And behind her grandmother is a man Janice knows well. He is holding a shotgun and it is pointed at her grandmother’s stomach. By the end of that day, six people connected to this farm will be dead.

 A grandmother, a mother, a father, three sons, one extended family spread across a house and a trailer that sat close enough to hear each other’s radios playing. and one person will survive to tell investigators, prosecutors, and eventually two separate juries exactly what happened inside those walls. This is not a story that begins on August 26.

To understand what happened on that farm, we have to go back further to a relationship that started 3 years earlier between a teenage girl and a man 5 years older than her. A relationship that produced a child. a relationship that by the time of the murders had already worn down two families and drawn the attention of law enforcement more than once.

 The man’s name was Wesley Devon Harris. Some court documents spell it Wesley Deon Harris, the result of a clerical error at the time of his arrest that was later corrected in the record. For simplicity, we’ll use Wesley Devon Harris throughout. He was 22 years old that August morning. He had a shotgun. He had a plan or something close to one.

And over the following several hours, he would move room to room, trailer to farmhouse, until an entire family was gone. What happened at Moody’s crossroads would end with a jury verdict, a mistrial, a second trial, and a sentencing decision that would divide the 12 people who decided Harris’s fate. A division that a judge would ultimately overrule.

 But before any of that, there was simply a relationship, a young girl, an older boyfriend, and a family trying in ways that would prove fatal to keep them apart. To understand what happened that Monday morning, we have to go back to how it all started. Janice Ball was 14 years old when she met Wesley Harris. He was 19.

 3 months after they met, she was pregnant. By most accounts, the relationship did not begin as anything unusual to the people around them. Harris became part of Janice’s world quickly. Within a few months of the pregnancy being confirmed, according to Janice’s later testimony, Harris kept his distance. She said she didn’t see much of him until their daughter, whom they called Sheay, was born.

 After Shea’s birth, Janice and Harris moved in together, living in a trailer in the nearby town of Leverne. It was during this period Janice would later testify that Harris became violent. She described him hitting her and being controlling. Eventually, she left the trailer in Lver and moved back to her family’s property, a farm at Moody’s Crossroads, where her grandmother, Ma Ruth Ball, lived in the main house.

 Ma Ruth was 65 years old, the matriarch of the family. Her daughter, Joanne, was married to a man named Willie Hasslip. Joanne and Willie lived in a trailer on the same farm property with their three sons. Jerry, the oldest at 19, Tony at 17, and their youngest son, who was 14, Janice, their daughter, lived not with them, but with her grandmother in the main house.

 It was Willie, Janice’s father, who tried to hold things together. According to Janice’s testimony, he bought a separate trailer and had it placed on the farm specifically so that Janice and Harris could live near the rest of the family. A way in Willy’s mind of keeping the young couple together so Harris could help raise his own daughter and so the family could keep an eye on all three of them.

 It didn’t work the way Willie had hoped. Janice testified that she and Harris lived in that trailer off and on because, in her words, Harris remained violent and controlling. This is an important detail and one worth sitting with for a moment. Not because it excuses anything that came later, but because it shapes almost everything that came later.

 The Ball family wasn’t a group of strangers who happened to cross paths with a dangerous man. They were Janice’s own relatives, living close enough to see and sometimes intervene in what was happening inside her relationship. And Harris, for his part, wasn’t someone hiding on the margins of the family. He had a trailer on their land.

 He had a daughter with one of their own. He was, in a sense, already inside the family structure, which is part of what made the escalation that followed so difficult to see coming and so difficult later to stop. By the summer of 2002, that structure was showing serious cracks. The relationship between Harris and Janice had cycled through separations and reconciliations.

PART2

The Ball family, parents, grandmother, brothers, had watched this cycle for roughly 2 years, and whatever patience they’d extended to Harris in the hope that he would settle into fatherhood was by August running out. What happened over the following weekend would bring that tension into the open and set in motion the final 3 days before the murders.

 By August 2002, Janice was pregnant again. She was 16. Their daughter Sheay was a toddler. The instability that had defined the relationship from the beginning hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had deepened. Janice would later testify that Harris remained physically abusive and controlling during the periods they lived together in the trailer her father had provided.

 Whatever affection or commitment had brought them together 3 years earlier now existed alongside real fear. Friday, August 23rd, 2002 brought that fear into a single specific confrontation. Janice and Harris were together in the trailer. Janice asked Harris to repay some money he owed her. money. She needed to buy diapers for Sheay. Harris refused.

 According to Janice’s testimony, he slapped her. She responded by throwing a phone at him. She told him to pack his things and leave. The argument didn’t stay inside the trailer. It spilled outside where Janice’s older brother, Jerry, saw what was happening. Jerry went and got a shotgun and gave it to Janice. She held the gun on Harris, but then by her own account, she handed it back to her brother without using it.

 Harris left the farm that night. Janice stayed behind in her grandmother’s house. It’s worth pausing on this moment because it captures something about the shape of this family’s response to Harris over that final weekend. They weren’t passive. When Janice needed backup, her brother didn’t hesitate. He armed her. This wasn’t a family unaware of the danger Harris posed.

 It was a family actively trying to manage it. weekend by weekend, confrontation by confrontation, using whatever tools were at hand, including on that Friday night, a shotgun that ended up back in Jerry’s possession rather than fired. What none of them could have known was that this same instinct to meet Harris’s aggression with a show of force, then step back once he retreated, was about to repeat itself twice more before Monday morning.

 And that pattern of driving Harris off the property without ever fully resolving what he might do next was running out of road. Harris didn’t disappear after that Friday night. He called Janice the next day, Saturday, at the McDonald’s where she worked and asked whether her family intended to press charges against him for the slap. She didn’t answer him.

 He called again on Sunday asking the same question. Again, Janice didn’t answer. That question, whether the family would press charges, appears to have consumed Harris over that weekend. It’s the thread that connects Friday’s slap to what would happen 48 hours later. Whatever else was in his mind, the fear of legal consequences seems to have been sitting alongside it, unresolved through two full days.

 By Sunday evening, Harris was back at the farm. And this time, what unfolded there would push the confrontation from a family dispute into something closer to a warning. Sunday evening, August 25th, Harris returned to Ma Ruth Ball’s house to talk to Janice. He sat on the porch. Janice stayed inside, speaking to him through the screen door.

 At some point, Janice went to tell her grandmother that Harris was there. Mila Ruth came to the door herself. She told Harris she was going to have him arrested and that she was calling Janice’s father over. Harris began backing away from the porch. He told Ma Ruth he didn’t want any trouble. But Ma Ruth had already made the call. Within minutes, Willie Hasslip, Janice’s father, arrived at the house along with his wife Joanne and two of the couple’s sons, Jerry and the youngest boy.

 Willie and Jerry were both carrying shotguns. Harris had already stepped off the porch by the time they arrived. Willie shouted into the night, telling Harris to leave the farm before he got hurt. Harris left. Janice and her family went back into their respective homes, the farmhouse and the trailer, and went to bed.

 Janice shared a room with her grandmother that night, the same way she had for months. It’s worth noticing what this Sunday night confrontation actually was. It was the Ball family once again using the same strategy that had worked on Friday, meeting Harris’s presence with an armed unified front and watching him retreat.

 From where the family stood, it likely felt like the situation was under control. Harris kept leaving. He kept backing down. There had been no violence in either confrontation, only the threat of it, diffused each time by numbers and by shotguns that were shown, but never fired. What none of them had any way of knowing was what Harris was carrying with him when he left the farm that Sunday night.

 Not a weapon this time, but something else. A grievance that had now been building for three straight days. A slap that led to a confrontation. A confrontation that led to two days of unanswered phone calls about criminal charges. And now a second night of being run off his own child’s family’s land at gunpoint. Whatever calculation Harris was making that Sunday night, it wasn’t visible to the family watching him walk away.

 To them, the danger had passed. For the second time in 3 days, they had no reason to believe Monday morning would be any different from the two confrontations that came before it. They were wrong, and by 8:30 the next morning, Harris was back on the farm. This time, not to argue and not to be turned away. Monday morning began quietly.

 Janice woke around 8:30 with Sheay beside her in bed. She heard the lock on the kitchen door turn, then muffled voices she couldn’t make out. Then she saw her grandmother, Mela Ruth, walking back into the bedroom with Harris behind her, a shotgun pointed at her stomach. Harris moved Janice and Ma Ruth into the kitchen.

 He made Mila Ruth get down on the floor. He handed Janice a roll of tape and told her to bind her grandmother’s hands. When Janice finished, Harris took the tape from her and resting the gun between his legs, retied Ma Ruth’s hands himself tightly. He told Ma Ruth it was going to be a lot better without her now. He told her to say her prayers.

 As she began reciting the Lord<unk>’s prayer, Harris shot her. He then took Janice back to the bedroom and bound her to a bed using a telephone line and an extension cord. He placed some of Shea’s toys on the bed and put the toddler up there with her mother. Then he asked Janice a question. What time did her brother Tony usually come by the house? Janice told him around noon or 12:30. Harris left the room.

Janice heard the shotgun fire again. She heard the front door open. Harris came back into the bedroom, cocked the shotgun so a spent shell ejected, and threw it onto the bed beside her. That was your brother, he told her. Tony Ball had been shot in the back of the head while he was still in his bed. Harris spent the next several hours moving between the house and the family’s trailer, and Janice remained bound the entire time, first with the cord, later gagged with a towel.

 Around 3:30 that afternoon, Jerry’s car pulled into the yard. As he did most days, Jerry had picked up his younger brother from school and dropped him at the trailer before driving back out. Harris left the house. Janice heard the door again. Heard Harris say, “Get over there.” The shotgun fired once more. According to the evidence presented at trial, when Jerry drove off after dropping his brother, Harris crossed to the family trailer.

 What followed there appears to have involved a struggle. The 14-year-old’s autopsy showed he had been shot twice with a pistol, once in a way that would have caused paralysis before being shot a third time with the shotgun. His body was found beside his grandmother’s in the kitchen of the main house. About a half hour later, Janice heard her father’s pickup truck pull into the yard.

 She watched through the window as Willie drove toward the back of the property. Harris was in the room with her. He’d told her he’d kill her if she tried to warn her father. When the truck passed, Harris left the house carrying a shotgun and a pistol. Janice didn’t hear a gunshot, but she heard the truck start again, then stopped near her grandmother’s house.

 Harris came back inside holding the shotgun. Willie Hasslip’s body was later found under a piece of metal in the family’s hog pen. He had been shot in the face. Harris returned to the house and cut Janice loose from the bed. He told her to get a bottle and pacifier for Sheay and the three of them climbed out through a bedroom window.

 Harris still armed, still warning Janice not to run. She didn’t. She was holding her daughter. Around 5:30 or 5:45 that evening, Joanne Ball, Janice’s mother, came home. Harris told Janice that if she tried to warn her, he would shoot her. He sat in a chair positioned behind the front door. When Joanne walked in, she looked at Janice, then continued into the living room, asking where Tony was.

 Harris told her to get on her knees. Joanne looked at him and said, “Fuck you.” She took a step toward Janice. Harris shot her in the back of the neck. She tried to run for the door. He shot her again from behind. Only Jerry remained. Harris spent time cleaning blood from the living room floor and gathering items to take.

 A radio, speakers, an amplifier, Willy’s wallet and phone. When Jerry’s car pulled back into the yard, Harris hid the shotgun behind his back and asked Jerry for a ride to the store. Jerry said something Janice couldn’t make out. The shotgun fired. Jerry ran for the porch, calling Janice’s name as he reached for the door. Harris shot him again.

 Once in the chest, once in the head. Six people, one farm, a single day. For most of that day, Janice Ball was either bound to a bed or standing close enough to hear what was happening to her family, one member at a time. She was tied with tape, then with a telephone cord and an extension cord. She was gagged with a towel. Her daughter, not yet 2 years old, was placed on the bed beside her for parts of the day and later carried out through a window as Harris moved them from the farmhouse to the family trailer.

Janice’s later testimony, the account that became the backbone of the state’s case, described a day spent under direct repeated threats. Harris told her more than once that he would kill her if she tried to warn a family member who was arriving or if she tried to run. When he climbed out the bedroom window with her and Sheay, Janice said she didn’t attempt to escape, in part because she was holding her daughter and had nowhere safe to run with a toddler in her arms while an armed man stood beside her.

This is worth stating plainly because it’s a question that surfaces in almost every case where a survivor stays close to the person committing violence. Janice did not run because there was no clear moment where running meant safety. She was restrained for much of the day. When she wasn’t restrained, she was carrying a small child.

 And by the time the physical restraints came off, five members of her family were already dead. And the sixth killing, her brother Jerry’s, happened within sight of the trailer where she was standing. Harris also used Janice as labor during the day, according to her testimony. having her tie her grandmother’s hands before he retied them himself and later having her help scoop dirt over blood on the porch and pack a bag for herself and Sheay before they left the property.

These were not choices Janice made freely. They happened under direct threat from a man who had already killed multiple members of her family in front of or within earshot of her. None of this made Janice a bystander to the case. It made her the only witness. And three days later, when Harris was finally taken into custody, the only person alive who could describe what had happened room by room, hour by hour, inside that farm.

 Her account would carry enormous weight at both of Harris’s trials. It would also be tested, cross-examined, and picked apart by Harris’s defense. A fact we’ll return to later in this documentary when we look at the arguments raised on Harris’s behalf. But on August 26th, 2002, before any of that legal battle began, Janice Ball was simply a 16-year-old girl tied to a bed with her toddler beside her, listening to her family disappear, one person at a time.

 By early evening on August 26th, Harris had packed his girlfriend’s mother’s car, a red grand dam with stolen belongings, several firearms, and the family’s dog. He put Janice and Sheay in the car with him, and they left the farm. What followed was a 3-day journey through Crenshaw County and the surrounding area, moving between the homes of Harris’s friends and relatives.

 Their first stop was a service station in Leverne where Harris sent Janice inside to buy snacks while he pumped gas. Janice later said she didn’t ask anyone inside for help. Her family had just been killed and she was afraid that seeking help from a stranger might put more people in danger. From there, Harris drove to his cousin’s home, also in Leverne, and left two shotguns with him.

 He drove to Doure and briefly saw a friend. He then visited his closest friend, Greg Daniels, and gave him three more guns to hide in the woods near his house. According to Daniels’s later testimony, Harris told him during this visit that he had offed the Ball family. Harris also sold several of the stolen shotguns to an acquaintance during this period.

 From Daniels’s house, Harris drove to Andalucia to the home of another friend, where he and Janice were able to sleep for a short time and clean up. Janice again said she didn’t seek help. Everywhere they stopped, they were surrounded by people loyal to Harris, and she believed those people would side with him over her.

 Eventually, Harris drove back through Lver, Rutled, and Doure before arriving at a nightclub called Koh’s Lounge near Rutled. He broke in, and the three of them stayed there for 2 days. It was during this final stop that Harris’s aunt intervened. She persuaded him to surrender. Agents from the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, accompanied by Harris’s aunt, arrived at Kohl’s Lounge and took Harris, Janice, and Sheay into custody.

 They were transported to the Loun County Sheriff’s Office. 3 days after six people were killed on a farm in Cshaw County, the man responsible for their deaths was in custody. Investigators arriving at the ball farm found a scene that matched almost exactly what Janice would later describe under oath. Mila Ruth Ball and her grandson John found in the kitchen.

 Tony Ball in his bed. Willie Haslip beneath metal in the hog pen. Joanne Ball in a back bedroom. Jerry Ball in the trunk of his own car. The scale of the crime drew attention well beyond Crenshaw County. six members of a single family killed in the course of a single day on a farm most of them had lived on for years.

Once Harris was in custody, he gave several statements to law enforcement officers over the following days. In one written statement, he described going to Janice’s house that morning after LSIT and said he had been using illegal drugs. He identified some of the weapons he said he used on specific victims, though his account of who was killed with which weapon did not always match the physical evidence collected at the scene, a discrepancy his defense would later point to.

 He was charged with six counts of capital murder. Two counts tied to the killings of Mila Ruth Ball and John Ball during the course of a burglary. Two more tied to Joanne Ball and Tony Ball on the same grounds. And a fifth count charging that all six victims, Ma Ruth Ball, Willie Haslip, Joanne Ball, Jerry Ball, Tony Ball, and John Ball were killed as part of one continuous scheme.

 The prosecution’s case rested heavily on two pillars. Janice Ball’s eyewitness account of the day and Harris’s own statements to investigators. Janice, still a teenager, would become the central witness against the father of her children, required to describe in a courtroom the death of nearly her entire family, with the man responsible sitting a short distance away.

 Before that testimony could be heard by a jury, Harris’s case would go to trial once and collapse before it reached a verdict. Harris’s first trial began in late 2004. For weeks, the case moved through witness testimony, cross-examination, and the slow architecture of a capital murder case with six victims. Then, while the trial was still underway, something surfaced that had nothing to do with the evidence.

 Jail officials recorded a three-way phone conversation involving Harris and two of his friends. In that call, one friend, Terresa Rogers, told Harris that she had spoken with a member of the jury, a man identified in court records only by his initials, WFJ, and that he had told her there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Harris, and that the trial would end in a hung jury.

 When this came to light, the trial court held a hearing. Rogers testified that she had spoken with the juror at her own house, discussing what she believed were lies being told by witnesses at trial. She also said she had spoken with two other jurors informally while running errands in town, one of whom, she said, walked away when he realized what was happening.

 The judge questioned each juror individually. The juror Rogers identified denied going to her house to speak with her. After the hearing, the court weighed its options. Removing the compromised jurors would have left too few remaining to deliberate. With no way to salvage the panel, the judge declared a mistrial on the grounds of jury tampering.

 The fallout extended beyond the courtroom. Rogers was later convicted of jury tampering. The juror she named was indicted for perjury. For the Ball family, for anyone who had expected a verdict after weeks of testimony, the collapse of the trial meant starting over. Harris would have to be tried again from the beginning. in front of a new jury.

 Harris’s second trial began in June 2005 in Crenshaw Circuit Court in front of Judge Ed McFaren. The prosecution’s case followed largely the same shape as before. Janice Ball’s account of the day, corroborated by physical evidence at the scene and by Harris’s own statements to investigators. Janice was cross-examined extensively by Harris’s defense team, attorneys Charlotte Tessmer and Steve Towns, who challenged her credibility on multiple fronts, her familiarity with firearms, inconsistencies between her account and the physical evidence, and her decision

not to seek help during the three days she spent traveling with Harris after the murders. The defense’s strategy, laid out clearly in opening statements, was to suggest that Harris had not acted entirely alone, and that Janice herself may have played a larger role in the events of that day than she admitted.

Defense council pointed to testimony that Janice had at times expressed anger toward her family, that she had access to firearms during the relevant period, and that she stood to inherit money from her relatives estates. The defense also introduced mitigating evidence during the penalty phase.

 Evidence meant not to dispute what had happened, but to argue against a death sentence if Harris were convicted. This included evidence concerning Harris’s background, his limited criminal history prior to 2002, and evaluations touching on his cognitive functioning and intellectual capacity. A forensic psychologist evaluated Harris for competency issues ahead of trial.

 As part of this broader defense effort, the jury heard weeks of testimony from both sides. Physical evidence, expert witnesses, Janice’s account, and Harris’s own recorded statements to police. Unlike the first trial, this one reached its conclusion without external interference. The jury convicted Harris on all counts of capital murder.

 What came next would become the most consequential and most debated moment in the entire case. After the guilt phase verdict, the same jury moved into the sentencing phase, the portion of a capital trial where jurors weigh whether a defendant convicted of capital murder should receive life without parole or death.

 They heard the aggravating evidence, six victims, a single continuous scheme, the deliberate, methodical nature of the killings across the farmhouse and the trailer. They heard the mitigating evidence. Harris’s background, his age, evaluations of his mental functioning, the absence of a significant prior criminal record. Then they deliberated.

The jury returned a recommendation. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The vote was 7 to 5. Under Alabama law at the time, that recommendation was not the final word. Alabama was one of the last states in the country that allowed a trial judge to override a jury’s sentencing recommendation in a capital case to reject what the jury decided and impose a different sentence entirely.

 Judge McFaren ordered a presentence report. A sentencing hearing followed and in his written order, the judge stated that he found the jury’s recommendation baffled him given what he called the overwhelming evidence and the unanimous guilt phase verdicts on all counts. He noted that when he researched comparable Alabama cases in which judges had overridden jury recommendations of life, he could find no other case involving six victims killed in one continuous scheme, only cases with fewer victims, all of which had been upheld on appeal.

The judge also pointed to something he had personally observed during the trial. Several jurors, he noted, had been visibly emotional, openly weeping when they returned their guilt phase verdict. He suggested this emotional weight may have affected their ability to follow through with a death recommendation, even in the face of what he considered overwhelming aggravating evidence.

 Weighing what he found to be significant, aggravating circumstances against the mitigating evidence presented by the defense, Judge McFaren overrode the jury’s recommendation. He sentenced Wesley Devon Harris to death. Seven jurors had voted for life. A single judge decided otherwise. Harris’s case moved automatically into Alabama’s appellet system, as all capital sentences do.

 In 2007, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed both his convictions and his death sentence, rejecting each of the arguments raised on his behalf, including a direct challenge to judicial override itself, the practice that had placed Harris on death row despite his jury’s recommendation. The Alabama Supreme Court declined further review.

 In 2009, the United States Supreme Court denied Certiari as well, closing the door on Harris’s direct appeal. Harris was transferred to Holman Correctional Facility, where he remains today. Nearly a decade after Harris was sentenced, Alabama’s legislature changed the law that had made his death sentence possible.

 In 2017, the state abolished judicial override in capital cases, joining every other state in the country in requiring that a jury’s sentencing decision be final. The change did not apply retroactively. It came too late to affect the men and women, including Harris, already sentenced to death under the old system.

 Harris’s direct appeal was over, but his case was not finished. Under Alabama procedure, condemned inmates are entitled to pursue a separate track of postconviction review, a chance to raise claims that go beyond the trial record itself, including allegations about the jury that decided their case. Harris filed that petition in 2009.

 It would take a decade to resolve. Harris’s postconviction petition raised a series of claims about the jury that convicted him and recommended his sentence. allegations, not proven facts. And it’s important to be precise about that distinction as we walk through them. His lawyers argued that two jurors had failed to disclose relevant information during jury selection.

 One juror, they alleged, had personally seen Harris driving through her neighborhood the day after the murders and recognized something troubling in his behavior, but never mentioned this to either side during questioning. Another juror, they claimed, had served as a pawbearer at one of the victim’s funerals without disclosing that role when asked what he knew about the case.

 Harris’s lawyers also alleged that jurors had improperly discussed sentencing outcomes during their guilt phase deliberations, effectively negotiating verdicts in exchange for sentencing votes. They alleged that a member of the victim’s family had repeatedly written and traced words like fear and scared on paper near the jury box in a way meant to intimidate jurors.

 And they alleged that some jurors had made racially charged remarks about Harris during deliberations. The courts that reviewed these claims did not find in Harris’s favor. On the disclosure claims, the reviewing court found that neither juror had actually been asked the specific questions that would have required them to share the information Harris’s lawyers pointed to.

 Under Alabama law, jurors have no independent duty to volunteer information nobody asked them for. On the claim about sentencing negotiations, courts have long held that what happens inside a jury’s private deliberations generally cannot be used to challenge its verdict afterward. with narrow exceptions that didn’t apply here.

 The claim involving intimidation near the jury box was found to lack the specific detail the law requires. No name, no clear time frame, nothing beyond the allegation itself, and the racial comment claim was dismissed on similar grounds. Harris’s petition never identified which juror allegedly made the statements. Alongside the juror claims, Harris’s petition also argued that his trial attorneys had been ineffective for not calling additional expert witnesses, for not pursuing certain lines of cross-examination, and for other strategic decisions made

during both trials. Courts reviewing those claims found that in most instances, the record showed defense council had in fact pursued the very strategies Harris argued they’d failed to pursue. questioning Janice extensively about her possible involvement, retaining a DNA expert even if they ultimately relied on cross-examination rather than calling him to testify, and building a defense around the theory that Janice herself may have played a larger role than she admitted.

 In 2021, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the dismissal of Harris’s postconviction petition in full. More than 20 years have passed since the morning a shotgun was raised in a farmhouse kitchen at Moody’s Crossroads. Wesley Devon Harris remains on Alabama’s death row at Holman Correctional Facility under an active sentence of death, still working through the layers of appeal that remain available to him.

 Janice Ball, the 16-year-old girl who survived that day bound to a bed with her toddler beside her, became the central witness in both trials. the person who had to describe twice in open court what happened to her grandmother, her mother, her father, and her three brothers. Mila Ruth Ball, Willie Hasslip, Joanne Ball, Jerry Ball, Tony Ball, John Ball.

 Six people, three generations of one family, gone within the span of a single day in August 2002. What remains unresolved isn’t the question of what happened on that farm, Harris confessed. Janice testified. Two juries in two separate trials heard the evidence and reached a guilty verdict. What remains unresolved is a narrower, harder question.

 The one sitting at the center of Harris’s sentence. 12 people sat through weeks of testimony about six murders. Seven of them looked at all of it and recommended that Harris live out his life in prison. Five recommended death. One judge reviewing the same evidence those 12 people had already weighed decided the seven were wrong. Alabama no longer allows that.

 The law changed in 2017. It didn’t change in time for Harris. He is still there on death row in a state that no longer sentences anyone the way it sentenced him. waiting on a system to finish deciding whether the punishment fits a crime no one disputes he committed.