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DENVER-

A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned the death penalty for an Oklahoma man convicted for his role in killing three men in September 1996 and then burning the house where the bodies were found.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Glenn Anderson of Chickasha, Okla., that he received insufficient representation from his attorney during his sentencing hearing, and ordered that he be resentenced.

Anderson was sentenced to death in July 1997 on charges including three counts of first-degree murder. He was one of three men convicted in the deaths of James Donald Poteet, 51, and Keith Allen Smith, 24, both of Alex, Okla.; and Terry Lynn Shepard, 39, of Cement, Okla.

Richard Alford Thornburg was executed for his role in the slayings in April 2006. Roger Dale Embry is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors said the killings occurred during an argument over drugs and money, and said the three defendants thought Poteet shot at Thornburg the week before his death.

In his appeal, Anderson argued that during the death penalty phase of his trial, his attorney failed to investigate potential mitigating evidence. The trial judge agreed, but ruled that the problem didn’t harm Anderson’s case.

A panel of three federal appeals judges overturned that ruling, saying the attorney’s performance prevented Anderson from receiving a fair penalty-phase hearing.

Declarations by investigators provided to Anderson’s attorney indicated that the attorney “undertook only the most rudimentary investigation of Anderson’s background, choosing to focus his investigatory efforts almost exclusively on the guilt phase of the trial,” the ruling said.

“Thus, rather than offering the jury a potential explanation for Anderson’s actions relating to the murders he participated in, trial counsel’s case in mitigation was limited to a simple plea for mercy,” the ruling said.

The ruling said investigators working on Anderson’s appeal learned he was the 12th of 13 children and “raised in an environment of neglect and abuse;” that he suffers from brain damage, likely from drug use or repeated head injuries, that left him “borderline mentally defective;” and that he had failed to overcome his addiction to methamphetamine.

The ruling said because Anderson’s attorney failed to fully investigate potential mitigating factors, prosecutors were able to argue “convincingly” to the jury that there was nothing to diminish his “moral culpability.”

“However, there existed readily available evidence which could have both explained to the jury the reasons Anderson was predisposed to act in concert with Thornburg and Embry on the night of the murders and demonstrated Anderson was less morally culpable than the average defendant for committing the murders,” the ruling said.

The appeals-court judges said if the jury had been presented more information about Anderson’s background, there was a possibility that at least one juror would have voted against the death penalty.

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The case is No. 04-6397.

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