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Georgia to execute man, 6th this year for that state
Georgia officials plan to carry out an execution Thursday that would set a modern record in the state — and, if the lethal injection happens, would be the country’s first in more than two months.

Authorities plan to execute John Wayne Conner, who was convicted of murder more than three decades ago, by lethal injection on Thursday night. The Supreme Court denied his requests for a stay in an order issued about 90 minutes after his lethal injection was originally scheduled to begin.

Conner’s execution would end a nationwide pause in executions that has lasted for nine weeks as the dwindling number of states still looking to put inmates to death have struggled to obtain lethal drugs and faced uncertainty stemming from court rulings and problems with earlier executions. Conner, if put to death, would be the 15th person executed in 2016.

Conner had appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that he was sentenced to death at “a time when Georgia systemically failed to provide competent counsel at trial and on appeal.” His attorneys wrote in their court filings that he is “an undisputedly cognitively impaired man,” and said the idea of executing him more than three decades after his sentencing would be unconstitutional.

State officials responded in a filing saying that lower courts have “thoroughly reviewed his case and reliably found no constitutional violations” leading to Conner’s conviction or death sentence and urged the court to reject the request to stay his execution.

On Thursday night, the Supreme Court denied Conner’s request for a stay. The only recorded dissent came from Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who pointed to the long gap between Conner’s sentencing and scheduled execution and said he would have accepted the case “to consider this constitutional question.”
What constitutional question? That the defense team nearly succeeded in running out the clock?
Breyer, who has previously raised the issue of long waits before executions before, wrote in his brief dissent that he would have heard the case “for reasons I have previously expressed.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Georgia Supreme Court denied a stay request for Conner, 60, in a 5-to-2 decision.

According to the court, Conner was sentenced for killing J.T. White in 1982 after a fight sparked when White told Conner he wanted to have sex with Conner’s girlfriend. Conner then beat White, left him in a ditch and returned later to ensure that White was killed, the court said. A medical examiner later said that White drowned in his own blood and that portions of his jaw were broken apart when a blunt object hit his face, the Georgia Supreme Court added.

State records show that in the years before Conner was convicted of killing White, he had been in and out of prison, serving four different stints behind bars between 1974 and 1981.

A day before the court’s ruling, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles — the only entity in the state that can commute a death sentence or convert it to life in prison — denied Conner’s clemency request.

Conner’s execution was scheduled for 7 p.m. at a Georgia state prison in Jackson, about 50 miles southeast of Atlanta.

This lethal injection, if carried out, would be the sixth in Georgia this year, matching Texas for the most in the country during that time. That would also mark the most executions for Georgia in a single year since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — a record that would be set with more than five months still left on the calendar.
At least we lead the country in something.
Posted by: Steve White 2016-07-15
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=461667