Georgia

History of the Death Penalty

Georgia has employed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment since colo­nial times, with exe­cu­tions record­ed at least as ear­ly as 1735. Crimes pun­ish­able by cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Georgia have his­tor­i­cal­ly includ­ed mur­der, rob­bery, rape, horse steal­ing, and aid­ing a run­away slave. Up until the 1920s exe­cu­tions were gen­er­al­ly car­ried out by hang­ing, although the con­demned were some­times exe­cut­ed by fir­ing squad and at least two were burned at the stake. The first Georgia exe­cu­tion to uti­lize the elec­tric chair was car­ried out in 1924. Electrocution quick­ly sup­plant­ed hang­ing as the state’s pri­ma­ry exe­cu­tion method, although hang­ing was still used inter­mit­tent­ly until 1931. Electrocution remained the pri­ma­ry method of exe­cu­tion until October 5^th, 2001 when the Georgia Supreme Court declared the prac­tice uncon­sti­tu­tion­al as cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment, after which Georgia con­vert­ed to using lethal injec­tion. Before 1976, Georgia car­ried out 950 exe­cu­tions, the fourth-high­est num­ber of any state.

Timeline

1735 – First known exe­cu­tion in Georgia, Alice Riley hung for murder.

1816 – Georgia statute defines the fol­low­ing as cap­i­tal crimes when com­mit­ted by a slave or a free per­son of col­or: poi­son­ing or attempt­ed poi­son­ing; insur­rec­tion or attempt­ed insur­rec­tion; rape or attempt­ed rape of a white female; assault­ing a white per­son with a dead­ly weapon or with intent to mur­der; maim­ing a white per­son; and burglary.

1829 – Georgia pass­es a law mak­ing it a cap­i­tal crime for white per­sons to intro­duce into Georgia, or cir­cu­late in Georgia, any pub­li­ca­tion for the pur­pose of incit­ing a revolt among the slaves.

1863 – Georgia statute makes white per­sons sub­ject to the death penal­ty if they incite an insur­rec­tion or revolt of slaves, or attempt to do so.

1865 – Race-based death penal­ty statutes elim­i­nat­ed in Georgia.

1924 – Henson Howard, a black man, is the first per­son elec­tro­cut­ed by the state of Georgia. He was exe­cut­ed for rape and robbery.

1931 – Electrocution com­plete­ly replaces hang­ing as Georgia’s execution method.

1972 – The Supreme Court strikes down the death penal­ty in Furman v. Georgia, declar­ing all exist­ing death penal­ty statutes unconstitutional.

1973 – Georgia pass­es a new cap­i­tal punishment statute.

1976 – The Supreme Court decides reaf­firms the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and upholds Georgia’s death penal­ty statute in Gregg v. Georgia.

1977 – The Supreme Court rules in the case of Coker v. Georgia that the use of the death penal­ty for crimes like rape or rob­bery in which a vic­tim is not killed is unconstitutional.

1980 – The Supreme Court rules that the por­tion of Georgia’s death penal­ty statute allow­ing for the death penal­ty for mur­ders that are ​“out­ra­geous­ly or wan­ton­ly vile, hor­ri­ble or inhu­man” is unconstitutionally vague.

1986 – The Supreme Court decides the case of McCleskey v. Kemp, hold­ing that sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence of race dis­crim­i­na­tion in Georgia’s death penal­ty sys­tem was not enough to over­turn the defendant’s sentence.

1991 – Gary Nelson, a death row inmate, is exon­er­at­ed of the rape and mur­der of a young girl. It was revealed that pros­e­cu­tors had with­held evi­dence of Nelson’s innocence.

2001 – The Georgia Supreme Court finds elec­tro­cu­tion uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Georgia begins using lethal injec­tion as its method of execution.

2005 — Lena Baker is posthu­mous­ly par­doned 60 years after being exe­cut­ed in Georgia’s elec­tric chair. Ms. Barker was con­vict­ed by a jury of all white men after a one-day tri­al for killing her white employ­er and long-time sex­u­al abuser in self defense.

2008 — The Georgia State Senate over­whelm­ing­ly rejects a pro­pos­al that would allow non-unan­i­mous jury sen­tenc­ing ver­dicts in capital cases.

2011 — Roy Blankenship is the first per­son put to death in Georgia using pen­to­bar­bi­tal as the seda­tive in the three-drug lethal injec­tion execution process.

2013 — Timothy Johnson is acquit­ted of mur­der charges and released from prison 29 years after being sentenced.

2014 — The Georgia Supreme Court upholds Georgia’s law that hides the source and iden­ti­ty of the pre­par­er of drugs and equip­ment used in executions.

2015 — Kelly Renee Gissendaner is exe­cut­ed after plan­ning her hus­band’s mur­der at the hands of some­one else. She was the first female exe­cut­ed in Georgia in 70 years.

2016 – The U.S. Supreme Court over­turns the con­vic­tion and death sen­tence of Timothy Foster, rul­ing that pros­e­cu­tors uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly exer­cised their dis­cre­tionary jury chal­lenges to strike jurors because they were black. Foster, a black man, was sen­tenced to death by an all-white jury after pros­e­cu­tors removed every black prospec­tive juror from the jury pool.

2021 — The Georgia Supreme Court denies a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge to the state’s statu­to­ry require­ment that a cap­i­tal defen­dant must prove beyond a rea­son­able doubt that he or she is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled before being declared inel­i­gi­ble for the death penalty.

2022 — The Supreme Court affirms the prac­tice of using fed­er­al civ­il rights suit to chal­lenge state exe­cu­tion meth­ods. This deci­sion rejects Georgia’s con­tention that such chal­lenges must be brought in fed­er­al habeas cor­pus pro­ceed­ings when the death row pris­on­er pro­pos­es an alter­na­tive execution method.

Famous Cases

Furman v. Georgia (1972): William Furman was caught by home­own­er William Micke while attempt­ing to bur­gle Micke’s home. In his escape attempt Furman claims that he fired his gun blind­ly behind him and acci­den­tal­ly killed Micke. Furman was con­vict­ed of felony mur­der large­ly on the basis of his own state­ment to police, and sub­se­quent­ly sen­tenced to death. Furman’s lawyers appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the high­est courts in Georgia upheld the con­vic­tion. In 9 sep­a­rate opin­ions, and by a vote of 5 to 4, the Court held that Georgia’s death penal­ty statute, which gave the jury near­ly com­plete sen­tenc­ing dis­cre­tion, could result in arbi­trary sen­tenc­ing. The Court held that the scheme of pun­ish­ment under the statute was there­fore ​“cru­el and unusu­al” and vio­lat­ed the Eighth Amendment. Thus, on June 29, 1972, the Supreme Court effec­tive­ly void­ed 40 death penal­ty statutes, there­by com­mut­ing the sen­tences of 629 death row inmates around the coun­try and sus­pend­ing the death penal­ty through­out the United States because exist­ing statutes were no longer valid. Furman remained in prison until he was paroled in 1984. He was again con­vict­ed of bur­glary in 2004 and sen­tenced to twen­ty years in prison.

Gregg v. Georgia (1976): While two of the jus­tices in Furman v. Georgia wrote opin­ions declar­ing the death penal­ty itself uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, the nar­row­er opin­ion of Justice Potter Stewart declared only the death penal­ty statutes of the states uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because they allowed too much dis­cre­tion for juries to deliv­er arbi­trary death sen­tences. This legal rea­son­ing left open the pos­si­bil­i­ty for states to rewrite their cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statutes to estab­lish a more uni­form and less capri­cious death penal­ty pro­ce­dure. Many states quick­ly rewrote their death penal­ty statutes to con­form to the rules set down by the Supreme Court, and the first five cas­es to reach the nation’s high­est court are referred to col­lec­tive­ly as Gregg v. Georgia, named for Troy Leon Gregg, the first man in Georgia to be con­vict­ed under the new statute. In a 7 – 2 deci­sion, the Supreme Court upheld the new cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statutes of Georgia, Texas, and Florida because they pro­vid­ed suf­fi­cient guid­ance to the jury and required the state to prove beyond a rea­son­able doubt the exis­tence of at least one aggra­vat­ing fac­tor to the crime. In the same case the Supreme Court struck down the new cap­i­tal statutes of North Carolina and Louisiana because the statutes called for manda­to­ry death sen­tences for defen­dants con­vict­ed of capital murder.

Although Gregg’s con­vic­tion and sen­tence had been upheld, his exe­cu­tion would nev­er be car­ried out. The night before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion Gregg and four oth­er con­demned inmates sawed through their prison bars and walked out of Georgia State Prison wear­ing home­made prison guard uni­forms. They escaped in a car left for them in the park­ing lot by an accom­plice. Gregg’s three fel­low escapees were caught three days lat­er, but Gregg him­self was found float­ing in a lake after being killed in a bar fight.

Coker v. Georgia (1977): In 1974, Ehrlich Coker escaped from prison while serv­ing a sen­tence for sev­er­al charges includ­ing mur­der, kid­nap­ping, and rape. After his escape, he broke into the home of a mar­ried cou­ple, pro­ceed­ed to rape the wife (who he released short­ly after), and then stole the fam­i­ly car. He was con­vict­ed of rape and sen­tenced to death, as the jury found evi­dence of aggra­vat­ing fac­tors, includ­ing a pri­or felony record, and that the rape was com­mit­ted in the course of anoth­er felony (armed rob­bery). Coker chal­lenged the sen­tence as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al under the 8^th Amendment’s pro­hi­bi­tion against cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear his case. In a 7 – 2 deci­sion the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s pro­vi­sion for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as a penal­ty for rape, not­ing that a penal­ty of death for a crime in which the vic­tim did not per­ish was ​“gross­ly dis­pro­por­tion­al,” and thus uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. In the plu­ral­i­ty opin­ion Justice White wrote, ​“Rape is with­out doubt deserv­ing of seri­ous pun­ish­ment; but in terms of moral deprav­i­ty and of injury to the per­son and to the pub­lic, it does not com­pare with mur­der, which does involve the unjus­ti­fied tak­ing of human life.” At the time of the rul­ing, Georgia was the only state main­tain­ing the death penal­ty for the crime of rape of an adult.

Troy Davis was exe­cut­ed on September 21, 2011 for the mur­der of Marc MacPhail, an off-duty police offi­cer, in 1989. Davis was grant­ed three stays of exe­cu­tion pri­or to his final bid for clemen­cy, which the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied the day before his final sched­uled exe­cu­tion date despite claims of inno­cence. Seven of the nine eye­wit­ness­es involved in Davis’s tri­al recant­ed their tes­ti­mo­ny, and one of the two eye­wit­ness­es who did­n’t recant would have been the pri­ma­ry sus­pect in the case if he had. Davis attract­ed nation­al and inter­na­tion­al atten­tion, includ­ing pleas from for­mer President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, for­mer FBI Chief William Sessions and for­mer Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher. The con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing this case sparked debate over new eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny pro­ce­dures which could decrease chances of wrongful convictions.

Andrew Brannan, a dec­o­rat­ed vet­er­an of the Vietnam War, was exe­cut­ed on January 13, 2015. Brannan’s attor­neys asked the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant clemen­cy because Brannan suf­fered from post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der and bipo­lar dis­or­der. A police video from the crime scene illus­trat­ed Brannan’s errat­ic behav­ior. Joe Loveland, one of Brannan’s attor­neys, said, ​“There was a direct con­nec­tion between his ser­vice in Vietnam and the vio­lence that he was exposed to there and the ulti­mate events that occurred here. The basic ques­tion real­ly is, should a 66-year-old Vietnam War vet­er­an with no pri­or crim­i­nal record and who was 100 per­cent dis­abled under the VA stan­dards, both with PTSD and bipo­lar dis­or­der, at the time of the mur­der of the deputy sher­iff – should that per­son be executed?”

Warren Hill was exe­cut­ed on January 27, 2015, despite being pre­vi­ous­ly found to have intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abil­i­ty. The U.S. Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) banned the exe­cu­tion of indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty (at the time referred to as men­tal retar­da­tion) but allowed each state to set guide­lines for deter­min­ing whether an inmate has such a con­di­tion. In Georgia, cap­i­tal defen­dants are required to prove ​“men­tal retar­da­tion” beyond a rea­son­able doubt. It is the only state in the coun­try that sets such a high bur­den of proof for such claims. Earlier, a state judge found that Hill was intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, but under a low­er legal thresh­old than is required in the statute. In 2003, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the judge’s rul­ing in a 4 – 3 vote, hold­ing that Hill’s lawyers had failed to clear the thresh­old of ​“beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Kelly Gissendaner was exe­cut­ed on September 30, 2015 for recruit­ing Gregory Owen, with whom she was roman­ti­cal­ly involved, to mur­der her hus­band. Owen made a deal with pros­e­cu­tors for a life sen­tence with parole eli­gi­bil­i­ty. Gissendaner was the first woman exe­cut­ed in Georgia since 1945 and the only per­son who did not direct­ly com­mit the killing to be exe­cut­ed in Georgia since the state reestab­lished the death penal­ty in the 1970s.

Carlton Gary was exe­cut­ed on March 15, 2018. Gary was con­vict­ed of rap­ing and killing three women in the 1970s, in what pros­e­cu­tors claimed was part of a string of nine bur­glar­ies and rapes com­mit­ted by a sin­gle per­pe­tra­tor. Gary’s lawyers argued that new evi­dence that was either unavail­able or undis­closed at the time of his tri­al raised enough doubt about his guilt that he should not have been exe­cut­ed. In his clemen­cy peti­tion, his lawyers wrote: ​“We are not talk­ing about ques­tion­able recant­i­ng wit­ness­es who came for­ward long after tri­al, but hard phys­i­cal evi­dence of inno­cence.” Bodily flu­id test­ing per­formed on semen from two of the crime scenes like­ly excludes Gary, but con­clu­sive DNA test­ing couldn’t be per­formed because the sam­ples were con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed while in the pos­ses­sion of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab.

Notable Exonerations

In 1991, Gary Nelson walked out of Chatham County Jail a free man. He had been con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1980 for the 1978 rape and mur­der of a six-year-old girl. On his third appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, the Court over­turned his con­vic­tion and his death sen­tence on the grounds that his orig­i­nal tri­al had not been fair because the pros­e­cu­tion had with­held evi­dence from his defense. The coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors aban­doned the case for lack of evi­dence, stat­ing that ​“There is no mate­r­i­al ele­ment of the state’s case in the orig­i­nal tri­al which has not sub­se­quent­ly been deter­mined to be impeached or con­tra­dict­ed.” Nelson had spent 11 years on Georgia’s death row before he was finally freed.

Georgia has had 5 oth­er exon­er­a­tions:

• James Creamer
• Earl Charles
• Jerry Banks
• Robert Wallace
• Lawrence Lee

Notable Commutations/​Clemencies

In 2008, Samuel David Crowe was grant­ed clemen­cy by Gov. Sonny Perdue. The deci­sion came just two hours before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion. The Board of Pardons and Paroles did not pro­vide a rea­son for com­mut­ing Crowe’s sen­tence to life with­out parole. However, con­sid­er­able tes­ti­mo­ny from friends, pas­tors and even a for­mer cor­rec­tions offi­cer was pre­sent­ed to the board empha­siz­ing his exem­plary behav­ior and deep remorse while on death row.

In 1990, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles unan­i­mous­ly grant­ed clemen­cy to Billy Neal Moore. Moore had been sen­tenced to death for the mur­der of a 77-year-old man in 1974. While in prison, Moore had a spir­i­tu­al con­ver­sion and devel­oped a close rela­tion­ship with the vic­tim’s fam­i­ly. At Moore’s clemen­cy hear­ing, his vic­tim’s niece said, ​“This is our broth­er Billy and you can’t kill him. We’ve lost one fam­i­ly mem­ber and we’re not going to lose anoth­er. We don’t want you to exe­cute him.” Moore was lat­er released from prison and became a prison chap­lain and not­ed speak­er against the death penalty.

Resources

• American Bar Association Georgia Death Penalty Assessment Report
• Department of Corrections
• Southern Center for Human Rights
• Georgia Resource Center
   
• Prosecutors
• Public defend­er’s office
• Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
• The Open Door Community — a res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ty that pro­vides prison min­istry and includes cov­er­age of death penal­ty issues in their monthly newsletter.

Georgia Execution Totals Since 1976