He called the likelihood of his granting her request for reconsideration “remote”.
Advertisement
Kelly Gissendaner conspired with a man she was having an affair with to kill her husband, Doug, almost 20 years ago in Gwinnett County.
On Thursday, the Georgia Department of Corrections announced that the woman, Georgia’s only female on death row, had chosen her last meal.
And because of Owen’s sentence, Fletcher states he believes Gissendaner’s sentence is out of proportion to her role in the crime.
Gissendaner’s execution is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Jackson.
Owen and Gissendaner then met up and set fire to the dead man’s auto in an attempted cover-up, and both initially denied involvement, but Owen eventually confessed and testified against his former girlfriend. Owen received life for cooperating with prosecutors and could be eligible for parole in 2023.
At the scheduled time of that execution, on March 2, Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gwendolyn Hogan said that the drug, called pentobarbital, appeared cloudy. The spotlight was on pentobarbital in 2014 when Georgia executed Marcus Wellons.
Back in March, officials at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, where the state’s death chamber is maintained, thought the execution drug, pentobarbital, had a cloudy appearance. The department later concluded that the most likely cause of the drugs precipitating was because of the drug being stored at too low a temperature.
A lawyer for the only woman on Georgia’s death row argued Monday there’s a substantial risk of serious harm if his client’s execution proceeds as planned because officials still can’t explain a defect that turned up in the state’s lethal injection drug in March.
Two of Gissendaner’s three children have made public pleas to spare her life, saying their mother has changed and that they will be the ones who suffer if a second parent is taken from them.
Advertisement
Following that failed execution, Gissendaner’s legal team asked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to look at the state’s lethal injection process. Gissendaner’s lawyers plan to appeal Monday’s ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
