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Thread: Georgia Capital Punishment News

  1. #31
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    Number of Georgia inmates eligible for execution almost doubles

    By Bill Rankin
    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday nearly doubled the number of Georgia inmates who are now eligible to be put to death by lethal injection.

    The high court rejected appeals from three condemned murderers, including the oldest member of Georgia’s death row — 72-year-old Brandon Astor Jones, who was convicted of killing the manager of a Cobb County convenience store in 1979. This means state prosecutors can seek execution warrants at any time for seven men whose appeals have now been denied.

    The Supreme Court, on the first day of its October term, rejected three petitions that had been pending this summer. The decisions also were issued just days after the highly controversial execution of Kelly Gissendaner, who was the first woman put to death in Georgia in decades and whose case attracted international attention.

    “Because of all the litigation and questions about lethal injection, there’s been a backlog of cases here in Georgia,” said Atlanta lawyer Jack Martin, who has defended numerous death-penalty cases. “Now it looks like the floodgates are open. We’re going to have to see if we’re comfortable with executing someone just about every other week or so.”

    Gissendaner became the third person executed by Georgia this year, but there had been an eight-month lull since two inmates — Andrew Brannan and Warren Hill — were put to death by lethal injection in January. In the meantime, more and more appeals from condemned killers have been exhausted.

    Over the past 15 years, Georgia has executed 35 people, with four executions being the most in any single year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

    The inmates whose appeals were denied Monday:

    * Brandon Astor Jones, 72, who was sentenced to death for the 1979 robbery and murder of Roger Dennis Tackett, a 30-year-old high school teacher working a second job at a Tenneco convenience store. Ten years after Jones’ trial, a federal judge ordered Jones to be resentenced after it was revealed his trial judge had granted a juror’s request for a Bible during deliberations. In 1997, another jury sentenced Jones to death a second time (Jones’ co-defendant, Van Roosevelt Solomon, was executed in 1986).

    * Kenneth Fults, 46, who sits on death row for the 1996 killing of Cathy Bounds in Spalding County. Fults, who is African-American, ended a weeklong crime spree by breaking into his next-door neighbors’ home. He overpowered Bounds and shot her five times in the back of her head. Fults’ latest appeal said he did not receive a fair trial because one of his jurors was a racist. It included an affidavit from that juror who said he knew he would vote for death “because that’s what that (racial slur) deserved.”

    * Daniel Anthony Lucas, 36, who was sentenced to die for his role in the 1998 murders of three members of the Moss family during a botched burglary and robbery in Jones County. Lucas’ co-defendant, Brandon Rhode, was executed for the murders in 2010.

    Jones, Fults and Lucas join four other inmates who were already eligible for execution: Brian Keith Terrell, Marcus Ray Johnson, Travis Hittson and Joshua Daniel Bishop.

    Terrell, who was sentenced to death for killing a 70-year-old Newton County man in 1992, could be the next inmate scheduled for execution.

    Terrell’s execution previously had been set for March 10. But when Gissendaner’s execution, previously set for March 2, was postponed because a prison system pharmacist said the drugs prepared to execute her looked “cloudy,” Terrell’s execution was postponed too.

    http://www.myajc.com/news/news/crime...ution-a/nnwKd/

  2. #32
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    The secrets of the death penalty----Georgia's execution process is a 'classified' information under law

    By Bill Rankin
    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    In the shadow world of Georgia's death penalty, a doctor who is not practicing medicine writes a prescription for a patient who is certain to die.

    The doctor's role in this part of the execution process is shrouded in secrecy and wrapped in contradiction, an examination by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.

    The doctor violates the canon of medical ethics simply by issuing the prescription, so the state has rewritten the law to stipulate that the doctor is not practicing medicine when prescribing an execution drug. If the doctor's name were to get out, lawsuits and harassment would probably follow, so the state has declared the doctor's identity - and any document that includes his name - a "state secret."

    The killing drug is pentobarbital, a barbiturate commonly used by veterinarians to euthanize dogs and cats, but manufacturers refuse to sell it to states for executions. So the drug must be created by a "compounding" pharmacist, whose identity is also a state secret, and sold to the Department of Corrections.

    The only way for the state to legally obtain pentobarbital, however, is to have a doctor prescribe it. For this reason, court records show, the Department of Corrections hires a physician on a contract basis to write those prescriptions. (Yes, the contract is also a state secret. The state would not even provide a copy with all the names redacted to the AJC.)

    Georgia's execution process is 'classified' information under law

    The prescription itself apparently resembles most others. It spells out the drug and the dosage and contains the name of the "patient" - the state's instructions identify the condemned as a patient - plus his birthdate, Social Security number and address on death row. But it also concludes: "Administer as ordered per execution order."

    The state has blacked out this process for obvious reasons: public disclosure of the doctor's identity would expose him or her to lawsuits and harassment by anti-death penalty forces, as well as possible sanctions within the medical profession.

    For example, most records relating to the execution of Kelly Gissendaner last month are locked away. But the AJC has found partial records from an earlier case, that of the last man executed in Georgia. These documents include a redacted copy of the state's contract with the doctor: he or she was to be paid $5,000 a year to write prescriptions for lethal injection drugs. The state also provided a reserve fund of up to $50,000 for legal representation and up to $3 million in liability insurance should the doctor's identity be revealed and lawsuits follow.

    'It's wrong for a doctor to do that'


    Whether the doctor is known or not, however, medical experts question the ethics of a physician prescribing an execution drug - or a pharmacist filling a prescription for one.

    "It's wrong for a doctor to do something like that - to help take someone's life," said Stephen Brotherton, a Texas surgeon who chairs the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. "It's against the guidelines of the AMA's code of ethics for a doctor to do that."

    John Banja, a medical ethicist at Emory University's Center for Ethics, sees arguments on both sides of the issue.

    "Physicians are licensed by the state, and if the state believes there's a legitimate reason to carry out an execution, I do not have an objection to physicians participating if it doesn't violate their conscience," Banja said. "If it is in the public interest to have the death penalty, it would seem to me to be legal for them to participate."

    He then added, "But whether it violates the Hippocratic Oath, that's another question."

    Under the oath, which dates to the 5th Century B.C., physicians have sworn for millennia: "To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug."

    A court motion filed last year by lawyers for a former death-row inmate contends the practice violates state and federal law.

    The doctor "is merely performing data entry in the prescription pad that he or she has sold to (Corrections) for $5,000," the motion said.

    'How else would you get the medication?'


    Lawyers from the state attorney general's office have countered that the prison system's procurement of lethal-injection drugs is legal. In court filings, they cite the 2000 Georgia law that replaced the electric chair with lethal injection as the state's mode of execution. That legislation says the "prescription, preparation, compounding, dispensing or administration of lethal injection ... shall not constitute the practice of medicine or any other profession relating to health care."

    For this reason, regulations regarding prescription drugs do not apply, state lawyers assert.

    Michael Madaio, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, said the state's argument "doesn't seem entirely correct."

    "But how else would you get the medication?" he asked. "And if you believe in capital punishment and you're a physician hired by the state and it's your job, I guess that's what you have to do."

    When asked about the medical ethics of writing prescriptions for lethal-injection drugs, Madaio said, "It's certainly not something I would do."

    Under legislation passed in 2013, the names of all those who help prepare for an execution are shielded from public view. In upholding the law last year, the Supreme Court of Georgia said there are good reasons for the secrecy law. If the names are publicly disclosed, "there is a significant risk that persons and entities necessary to the execution would become unwilling to participate," the court said.

    'Such information is a classified state secret'


    The AJC recently filed an Open Records Act request for the current contract the state Department of Corrections has with the prescribing physician. When that was denied, the newspaper filed another request to the agency, asking for a redacted copy that shielded the physician's name and any other identifying information.

    That request was denied as well.

    "Because (Corrections) believes that the entire record containing such information is a classified state secret, it lacks the legal authority to release redacted copies of the document," Errin Wright, the agency's assistant counsel, told the AJC in an email message.

    The secrecy law was enacted after Georgia and several other states with capital punishment scrambled to find lethal-injection drugs because pharmaceutical companies refused to let their drugs to be used for executions. In Georgia, the prison system has turned to a compounding pharmacy to get its supply of pentobarbital.

    Under the Controlled Substances Act, pentobarbital can only be obtained with a valid prescription because it is a Schedule II drug. And Georgia law says a licensed physician can prescribe a controlled substance "for a legitimate medical purpose" and when the doctor is "acting in the usual course of his professional practice."

    Last year, lawyers for condemned inmate Tommy Waldrip argued that the state was fraudulently obtaining pentobarbital because those conditions were not being met. But Waldrip's litigation became moot when the State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted him clemency in July 2014.

    In their court filing, Waldrip's lawyers attached documents obtained from the Corrections Department by death-penalty lawyers representing another death-row inmate, Warren Hill. These records offer a glimpse of the arrangement between the prison system and the doctor who writes the prescriptions.

    'Just wanted to give you a heads-up'

    1 document, a draft "professional services agreement," says corrections would pay the doctor $5,000 for services rendered from July 1, 2013, to June 30, 2014.

    The documents also include a number of email exchanges from a corrections official to the pharmacy and the prescribing doctor in July 2013, about 6 months before Hill's execution in January. The names of those sending and receiving the emails were redacted.

    In one, the corrections official told the doctor that the pharmacist had just let the agency know what had to be on the prescription, such as the name of the "patient."

    "I will be happy to forward this information along to you when you are preparing to write the prescription," the official wrote. "I just wanted to give you a heads up."

    An email the next day instructed the doctor that, in addition to listing the patient's name, birthdate, Social Security number and address, the prescription should call for 50 milligrams of pentobarbital solutions and 6 syringes. The prescription's directions should say: "Administer as ordered per execution order."

    'Georgia is saying 2 contradictory things'


    The U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed the issue of whether doctors may lawfully prescribe an execution drug. But a decade ago, the high court ruled that then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft could not threaten to revoke the licenses of Oregon doctors who prescribed lethal doses of medication to help terminally ill patients end their lives.

    Ashcroft contended the Controlled Substances Act required every prescription for a Schedule II drug to be issued "for a legitimate medical purpose (and) in the course of professional practice." In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court held that Congress never gave the U.S. attorney general the "extraordinary authority" Ashcroft claimed he had.

    Robert Atkinson, the state attorney who argued the case, noted that Oregon's Death With Dignity Act considered assisted suicide to be a valid medical procedure. He questioned whether Georgia could prevail in the dispute about prescriptions by simply declaring lethal injections is not the practice of any profession relating to health care.

    "It seems to me that Georgia is saying 2 contradictory things," said Atkinson, who is now retired. "It's saying that writing prescriptions for lethal injections is not the practice of medicine, while only those who are engaging in the practice of medicine can write prescriptions. How do you reconcile that?"

    http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local...penalty/nn7fN/

  3. #33
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    States debating alternatives to lethal injection

    Lethal injection is the primary method used for the death penalty and in just days it'll be used on a Georgia death row inmate, but the drugs limited availability has some states looking for a new solution.

    The method has been the primary use of execution since 1982 and now 1,425 executions later, states are starting to rethink it for the death penalty. Virginia has a bill on the table trying to bring back the electric chair. It's passed the state house and senate and now waits for a Governor's signature.

    The main reason, the lethal drugs are hard to come by and we are seeing that close to home. Last year, South Carolina ran out of the lethal injection cocktail, putting 44 executions on hold. Also in March of last year the first woman put on Georgia's death row in 70 years Kelly Gissender had her death rescheduled several times between march and June because the lethal drug again was hard to come by.

    Also in June there was a case of cloudiness due to shipping and storing that delayed Gissender's death again. Georgia also had an issue a few years ago where it was running out of the drug completely. Starting from 2010 when states where asked to use a new formula several cases had botched drugs causing a slow death for several inmates, several states issued holds on capital punishment.

    Right now there are 19 states that have outlawed capital punishment, five states since 2009.

    Although there have been difficulties case by case, for now, Georgia is continuing with lethal injection for the death penalty. Joshua Daniel Bishop is scheduled to die on Thursday for an armed robbery where he beat a man to death for not turning over his Jeep keys. Another, Kenneth Fults is set for lethal injection execution on April 12th.

    http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/S...373702111.html

  4. #34
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    Georgia executions rise, while death sentences plummet

    It’s Georgia’s new death penalty paradox: the state is executing inmates at a record clip, but prosecutors almost never seek the death penalty anymore, and juries refuse to impose it when they do.

    During each of the past two years, Georgia executed five inmates. If, as expected, the state carries out another execution later this year, it will have put more people to death — six — in 2016 than in any single year since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment four decades ago.

    But the last time a Georgia jury imposed a death sentence was in March 2014. And district attorneys have been turning away from death as a sentencing option, more often allowing killers to receive sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    A decade ago, state prosecutors filed notices of intent to seek the death penalty against 34 accused killers. That number dropped to 26 in 2011 and to 13 last year.

    How many times have Georgia DAs sought the death penalty so far this year? Once. And this was against a man accused of killing a priest — a clergyman who had signed a document saying if he died a violent death he did not want his killer to face the death penalty.

    The incongruity of the increasing numbers of executions and the plummeting numbers of death sentences took both prosecutors and defense attorneys by surprise.

    “Wow,” Atlanta criminal defense attorney Akil Secret said. “Maybe the times are changing.”

    The precipitous declines raise the question of whether prior capital sentences were justified, Secret said. “If a life-without-parole sentence is sufficient for today’s worst crimes, why isn’t it sufficient for those crimes from the past where death was imposed?”

    In March, Secret represented one of the only two defendants to face death-penalty trials in Georgia this year. In both cases, juries in Fulton and Newton counties unanimously voted for sentences of life without parole.

    Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter also expressed surprise at the ongoing trends.

    “It’s certainly one of those odd occurrences,” said Porter, who has three pending capital cases. “But part of me says these (current) executions were cases where the sentences should have been carried out long ago. Also, the option of life without parole was never an option for them. It’s almost apples and oranges.”

    Asked whether he thought cases that received death sentences in the past should now be reconsidered for life without parole, Porter quoted a passage from the “Dune” science fiction series, “If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.”

    After the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, Georgia began executing inmates once again in 1983. In no year since then has the state executed more than five inmates in a single year. So far this year, Georgia has already executed five prisoners and more executions are expected by the end of the year.

    Is the death penalty no longer necessary?

    Brian Kammer, head of a nonprofit agency that represents condemned killers through their final appeals, said many inmates would not have been sent to death row had they been represented by competent lawyers. Today, he said, the state has a dedicated office with highly trained public defenders with the resources to thoroughly investigate their clients’ backgrounds.

    “Had such legal teams with adequate resources been available to these recently executed prisoners at the time they were tried originally, I am confident they would be alive today,” Kammer said.

    In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court used a Georgia case to abolish capital punishment. In 1976, in another Georgia case, the high court reinstated the death penalty. Since that ruling, Georgia has executed 65 condemned killers. There are now 63 inmates on death row.

    There is a consensus among state prosecutors and defense attorneys as to why the death penalty is not being sought as frequently as it was in the past and why juries are reluctant to impose it. Seven years ago, state lawmakers unanimously voted to allow prosecutors to obtain a life-without-parole sentence without having to file a notice to seek the death penalty.

    “It has made an enormous difference,” said Chuck Spahos, head of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. “When you start talking about the expense, the years of appeals and the length of the process that goes on and on and having to put victims’ families through that with no closure, the availability of life without parole with a guilty plea has become an attractive option.”

    Years ago, some state prosecutors sought the death penalty because all they really wanted to do was send a defendant to prison for the rest of his or her life, said Jerry Word, head of Georgia’s Capital Defender Office. “Now they no longer have to seek death to get what they really want. And the polls show that the public is becoming much more comfortable with life without parole.”

    ‘We’ve lost our sense of outrage’

    Doug Pullen, who made a name for himself obtaining death sentences as a Columbus district attorney in the early 1990s, said he believes society has become desensitized to violence.

    “We’ve lost our sense of outrage at such things,” said Pullen, who later served as a judge until he resigned amid an ethics probe. “For me personally, and I think for a large portion of my age group, it’s just absolutely appalling.”

    A defense attorney once told him that the death penalty would become so expensive and time-consuming it would die a natural death, Pullen said. “I guess I knew it was coming, but that it got here this fast kind of surprises me.”

    Not only are death sentences rare, death sentences once routinely imposed for certain types of murders have become nonexistent.

    Lawyers representing Brandon Astor Jones tried unsuccessfully to stop his execution in February. In 1979, Jones was sentenced to death for killing the manager of a Cobb County convenience store during an armed robbery. But death sentences for these kinds of armed robbery cases have not been imposed in Georgia in the past 20 years, an appeal filed on Jones’ behalf said.

    Layla Zon, the district attorney for Newton and Walton counties, said after she took office in 2010 she reviewed cases in which death sentences were obtained by her predecessors more than a decade ago. “You’d never get the death penalty in most of those cases today,” she said.

    “To me, it seems like a gunshot killing of a single victim is not going to rise to the level in jurors’ minds of what it takes to impose a death sentence,” Zon said. “Torture, depravity of mind, the killing of a child. That’s what it takes.”

    The last time a Georgia jury imposed a death sentence occurred in March 2014. Since then, no jury has given a capital defendant the ultimate punishment and more often than not prosecutors have allowed accused killers to enter into plea deals for sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    Zon leads state in death cases

    A recent motion filed on behalf of Rodney Young, sentenced to death in Newton County in 2012 for killing his ex-fiancee’s son, accused Zon of being “pathologically enthralled” with the death penalty. It said she has sought death at a rate unmatched by any other district attorney in Georgia and noted she had a battery-powered toy electric chair, called “Death-Row Marv,” in her office.

    Zon, who said the toy was in her office when she became DA and that she has since removed it, said she seeks death in cases that warrant it. Since 2011, there have been 13 death-penalty trials in Georgia, with four taking place in Newton. Zon’s office also obtained two of the state’s five death sentences during that time.

    Last month, Ashley Wright, district attorney of the Augusta Judicial Circuit, filed the first and only notice to seek death so far this year. She is seeking it against Steven James Murray, who is accused of kidnapping Catholic priest Rene Robert, forcing him into the trunk of his car and then driving him to Burke County, where he shot and killed him.

    After the notice was filed, Wright said, Robert’s Catholic diocese in St. Augustine, Fla., sent her a document that Robert had signed years ago. The document said that in the event he died a violent death, Robert, who had protested against executions, did not want his killer to get the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime or how much Robert had suffered.

    Wright said she is proceeding with the capital prosecution.

    “We make our decisions based on the facts and the law, not public opinion,” she said.

    http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local...es-plum/nrhrM/

  5. #35
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Judge: Georgia can keep execution drug provider secret

    ATLANTA (AP) - Georgia doesn’t have to reveal information about its execution drug to two Mississippi death row inmates, a federal judge in Atlanta has ruled.

    The inmates, Richard Jordan and Ricky Chase, sought the information as part of a legal challenge to Mississippi’s three-drug execution protocol. U.S. District Judge J. Clay Fuller wrote in an order Thursday that Georgia law prohibits the release of the information and granted the state’s request to quash the inmates’ subpoena.

    Jim Craig, an attorney for Jordan and Chase, said Friday they are still reviewing their options and considering what steps to take next.

    The inmates say Mississippi’s three-drug method is torturous and unconstitutionally cruel, and they question why that state doesn’t adopt a one-drug execution method as other states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas, have done. They have sought details about how those states obtained execution drugs to meet their legal burden of showing there’s a known, available alternative.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-provider-sec/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  6. #36
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    Georgia governor reappoints parole board member to full term

    ATLANTA (AP) -- Georgia's governor has reappointed a member of the state parole board to a full seven-year term.

    The State Board of Pardons and Paroles announced the reappointment of board member Jacqueline Bunn.

    She was initially appointed to the board over the summer to fill the unexpired term of former member Albert Murray, who retired.

    Bunn was appointed executive director of the state's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council in 2013.

    She previously worked as an assistant attorney general focused on civil rights and as deputy director of the Georgia Department of Public Safety's legal services unit.

    The state parole board consists of five full-time voting members who determine who is released on parole and whether clemency is appropriate in death penalty cases.

    They also have the authority to grant pardons and reprieves.

    http://www.wctv.tv/content/news/Geor...407358885.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #37
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    Georgia led nation in number of executions in 2016

    By Sandy Hodson
    The Augusta Chronicle

    Georgia led the nation in the number of executions carried out in 2016 by putting nine men to death.

    But as the number of executions has been high in Georgia in the past two years, the number of people on death row has shrunk and no new death sentences were imposed last year.

    The last person sentenced to death in Georgia was Augusta resident Adrian Hargrove, 39, in March 2014. Six years earlier, Hargrove stabbed to death pregnant teen Allyson Pederson and her mother and stepfather, Sharon and Andrew Hartley.

    Fewer prosecutors seek death sentences now, District Attorney Ashley Wright said. When she filed notice of her intention to seek a death sentence if Steven Murray is convicted of murder for the slaying of a 71-year-old priest this year, it was only the second death penalty notice filed in Georgia in 2016, Wright said.

    Two changes in the law account for some of the decline – since 1993, jurors in death penalty cases have the option of imposing a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, and since 2010, prosecutors could seek a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole without first seeking a death sentence.

    A look at the sentencing dates for the 58 men on Georgia’s death row currently shows the effects. Twenty-seven of the inmates were sentenced to death in the 1990s and 18 were sentenced in the 2000s. But only five death row inmates were sentenced since 2010.

    When a prosecutor seeks to prosecute a homicide as a death penalty case, time slows to a crawl. It is not uncommon for cases to take several years to make it to trial, and if there is a conviction and death sentence, decades can pass before appeals are completed. And over the years, more death row inmates have had their sentences vacated and re-sentenced to life in prison than executed.

    Of the men executed in 2016, the years spent on death row ran from nine years by Steven Spears, who waived his appeals, to 36 years for Brandon Jones, who was 72 years old when executed Feb. 3.

    While few people have received death sentences in the past decade, the majority of Georgia’s death row inmates are in the final stage of their appeal process, the federal habeas corpus. Thirty of the 58 inmates are in the final rounds, although the final round can take years to litigate. Virgil Presnell has been on death row since 1976 for the rape and murder of a Cobb County child.

    Another inmate with a pending federal habeas corpus petition is Reinaldo Rivera, a self-confessed serial killer sentenced to death in Richmond County Superior Court in 2004. His case is before U.S. District Judge J. Randal Hall.

    A third death row inmate from Augusta, Robert Arrington, was denied relief in his state habeas petition in December. He can appeal through the federal habeas corpus next. Arrington was sentenced to death in 2004 for the slaying of 46-year-old Kathy Hutchens in 2001. Arrington had previously served time in prison for killing his wife.

    http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/20...xecutions-2016

  8. #38
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    Georgia conservatives want to ‘re-think’ death penalty

    A group of Georgia conservatives on Thursday will call for the state to re-examine the death penalty but thus far will stop short of calling for a end to state-sanctioned executions.

    The group, calling itself Georgia Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. Thursday. The organization includes Rep. Brett Harrell, R-Snellville.

    “I am skeptical of our government’s ability to implement efficient and effective programs, and so a healthy skepticism of our state’s death penalty is warranted,” Harrell said in a statement. “Many individuals have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to die. Meanwhile, taxpayers are forced to pay for this risky government program, even though it costs far more than life without parole.”

    Group spokesman Jon Crane said Thursday’s event “is the state of the process of educating people about the problems with the death penalty and to have a candid discussion from a conservative perspective.”

    There is not yet, he said, a call for repeal.

    Georgia executed more prisoners in 2016 than any other state in the nation, although it’s been nearly three years since a Georgia defendant was sentenced to death.

    Other members of the group meeting Thursday include David Burge, former 5th District Republican Party chair, Richard Lorenc, chief operating officer of Foundations for Economic Freedom, Austin Paul, co-chair of the Mercer University College Republicans, Jennifer Maffessanti, chair of the Atlanta chapter of America’s Future Foundation and Marc Hyden, national coordinator of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.

    http://www.ajc.com/news/state--regio...dnIGndCddwoWI/
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  9. #39
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    Augusta chronicles has given me a list of all inmates on death row as of December 31st 2016. http://chronicle.augusta.com/slidesh...nmates#slide-1

  10. #40
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    Hello all
    Not sure what thread I should ask this question in but when will Georgia crank back up like 2016 ?

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