ERIK S. LESSER/EPA Kayla Gissendaner speaks with anti-death penalty protesters before the scheduled execution by lethal injection of her mother, Kelly Gissendaner, in Jackson, Georgia on September 29, 2015. She was the first woman to be executed in Georgia since 1945.
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The U.S. state of Georgia has rejected calls from Pope Francis and other activists who urged clemency be granted to a woman on death row.
Kelly Gissendaner’s supporters, including her three grown children, want her sentence commuted to life in prison.
Later Monday, Gissendaner’s attorneys appealed Thrash’s ruling denying the stay to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Gissendaner was executed at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson, Ga., which is about 48 miles southeast of Atlanta.
In yet another attempt to keep their client alive, lawyers for Kelly Renee Gissendaner have filed yet another stay of execution with the United States Supreme Court.
Two of Gissendaner’s three children had previously addressed the board, but her oldest son hadn’t.
While waiting for an answer from the board, a representative for Pope Francis sent a letter saying that his Holiness wanted the board to spare Gissendaner’s life.
The board declined to grant her clemency, though they did not give a stated reason for the decision. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole received a letter from Pope Francis as it met Tuesday to determine whether Gissendaner would be executed. Kelly Gissendaner arrived at the scene just as her husband died. Owen now is serving a life sentence, but will be eligible for parole in 2022.
Gissendaner’s children have pleaded for her life.
In a last-ditch bid to get the execution cancelled, she argued the drugs Georgia planned to use might be defective since her last scheduled execution was called off because the chemicals appeared cloudy.
The board could have let its earlier denial of clemency stand, issued a stay of up to 90 days to further consider the case, or granted clemency and commuted her sentence.
Owen and Kelly Gissendaner discussed killing Douglas Gissendaner “on four or five occasions, all at [Kelly] Gissendaner’s initiation, before reaching a final agreement to kill him”, according to Georgia’s Attorney General’s office.
Her former lover, Gregory Owen confessed to beating and stabbing Douglas Gissendaner and then trying to make the murder look like a robbery. “In the process, I saw that my mom had struggled through the years to come to grips with what she had done and face her own horror about her actions”.
Tonight at seven O’Clock on the dot a small group gathered at the courthouse in Augusta right under Lady Justice praying for the life of Kelly Gissendaner.
“She’s been given more rights and opportunity over the last 18 years than she ever afforded to Doug who, again, is the victim here”.
Gissendaner, now 47, was sentenced to death November 20, 1998, after she was found guilty of orchestrating the death of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner, in 1997.
Gissendaner was ready, said the Rev. Della Bacote. The Randolph County native was executed in 1945 for killing a white man. Decades later, the state pardoned her, ruling she acted in self-defense and was convicted in a sham trial because she was black.
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Gissendaner was convicted of murder in the February 1997 slaying of her husband.
