Georgia executed the only woman on its death row on Wednesday, hours after the State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected her final plea for clemency and nearly seven months after her execution was postponed because a lethal injection drug had become “cloudy.”
A Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman said the inmate, Kelly Renee Gissendaner, who was convicted of orchestrating her husband’s 1997 murder, died at a state prison in Jackson, southeast of Atlanta, at 12:21 a.m. Read more and more photos...
Ms. Gissendaner, 47, was the fifth woman to be executed in the nation in the past decade,
according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Two more executions are scheduled this week, including Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma prisoner. He is among the inmates who this year lost a United States Supreme Court case
that challenged the use of a particular sedative, midazolam, in executions.
In Georgia, Ms. Gissendaner was put to death after the federal courts refused to intercede and the state panel turned down an application for clemency that drew the support of Pope Francis. Visiting the United States last week, Francis had urged Congress to abolish the death penalty.
Ms. Gissendaner’s guilt in the death of her husband, Douglas, was uncontested, but her
lawyers cited her “sincere remorse and
acceptance of responsibility” in a filing this month. Her supporters argued that her “good works in prison” justified a commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment.
State officials and some members of Mr. Gissendaner’s family said that her death sentence was appropriate.
“She had no mercy, gave him no rights, no choices, nor the opportunity to live his life,” Mr. Gissendaner’s family said in a statement released by the district attorney’s office in Gwinnett County, where the murder took place. “His life was not hers to take.”
Ms. Gissendaner’s lawyers also argued that her sentence was inappropriately severe because Georgia had not executed a “non-trigger person” since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
The man who carried out the murder, Gregory Owen, Ms. Gissendaner’s boyfriend, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a plea agreement. Ms. Gissendaner, who rejected an offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment with the eventual possibility of parole, was convicted in 1998.
Ms. Gissendaner later achieved some renown for her spiritual development during her
incarceration, and the pope tried to intervene on Tuesday.
“While not wishing to minimize the gravity of the crime for which Ms. Gissendaner has been convicted, and while sympathizing with the victims, I nonetheless implore you, in consideration of the reasons that have been presented to your board, to commute the sentence to one that would better express both justice and mercy,” Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a letter on Francis’ behalf.
Popes have sometimes asked the American authorities to stop executions, as Pope John Paul II did in 2001 when he wrote to President George W. Bush on behalf of Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City.
Ms. Gissendaner’s legal argument had recently focused on whether her postponed execution in March amounted to a violation of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Then, Georgia’s corrections commissioner canceled Ms. Gissendaner’s execution because of concerns about the state’s supply of pentobarbital.
Georgia officials suspended executions amid a review of the state’s procedures, and they later said that the pentobarbital had not been contaminated. Instead, they said it had precipitated, most likely because the drug was “shipped and stored at a temperature which was too low.”
After the postponement, Ms. Gissendaner’s lawyers argued that bumbling state officials had essentially forced Ms. Gissendaner to face “hours of unconstitutional torment and uncertainty — to which she had not been sentenced — while defendants dithered about whether they could execute her.”
That argument failed in several federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, which rejected Ms. Gissendaner’s final appeal late Tuesday.
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