(This is a copy of the original story on the AJC site.)
Reprinted with the permission of the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution.

'Terrell' evidence barred
By Jack Warner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday • January 7

A judge has thrown out key state evidence in the impending death penalty trial of Pharina Peterson, accused in the torture death of her 5-year-old grandson, Terrell.

Fulton Superior Court Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane granted a motion to suppress the evidence because an Atlanta police detective gathered it from Peterson's apartment without a search warrant.

District Attorney Paul Howard said Thursday he has appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court. Without the evidence, he said, "the killers of Terrell Peterson could well go free."

Peterson, 51, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend have been charged in the boy's death. The state is seeking the death penalty against the two women, and Pharina Peterson's trial was scheduled to begin Jan. 27. Lane refused the state's request to delay the trial, but Howard's office contends the appeal automatically delays the trial until a decision is handed down.

Teri Lynn Peterson, Terrell's aunt, is scheduled to face trial in April. The exclusion of the evidence applies in her case, too.

At one hearing in the case, Det. R.B. Griffie testified he went to the Peterson apartment after being called to Grady Memorial Hospital to investigate Terrell Peterson's death.

Uniformed officers were already at the apartment, he said, and two other children were asleep.

Griffie called a police photographer to take pictures of three handwritten notes, a pair of brown panty-hose, a severed telephone cord and a leather belt, and then he collected them as evidence.

The state contends Griffie was entitled to take the evidence without a warrant because it was in plain view, requiring no actual search. Griffie was entitled to enter the house without a warrant, the state claims, because placing the children in protective custody was an emergency.

But Lane ruled no emergency existed. "The dead child was already dead, the officer had already been to the hospital to see the dead child, there was no allegation that there had been any foul play involving the remaining children (and) the two officers were caring for and protecting the children."

Griffie, she wrote, "gave no explanation as to why either he or one of the uniformed officers was unable to go to a magistrate and obtain a search warrant for the home."

Howard, in a statement, said, "We believe that the officer was justified in his actions and lawfully obtained this evidence."

The full story of Terrell's short, miserabletragic life and brutal death, made public as a result of a court petition filed by the Journal-Constitution, created a new hue and cry against the Department of Family and Children Services.

DFACS workers engaged in a long series of failure to take action on a growing list of reports of Terrell's abuse. Finally, after Terrell was hospitalized in December of 1996 afterfollowing a severe beating, and Pharina Peterson was charged with it, no one from DFACS showed up at her hearing and the case was dismissed.

The child died in January of 1998. He had suffered so much abuse and neglect that doctors could not pinpoint the specific event that killed him.