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Ivon Stanley Georgia Execution

Ivon Stanley was executed by the State of Georgia for the murder of an insurance agent. According to court documents Ivon Stanley and Joseph Thomas planned to rob the victim, Clifford Floyd. The two men would kidnap the victim, bring him to a remote location where he was shot and buried alive. Joseph Thomas would be arrested first and would confess to the murder which lead to the arrest of Ivon Stanley. Ivon Stanley would be convicted and sentenced to death. Ivon Stanley would be executed by way of the electric chair on July 12 1984, Joseph Thomas would be initially be sentenced to death however later would be sentenced to life

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Ivon Stanley, a killer who buried his victim alive, died in Georgia’s electric chair shortly after midnight Thursday but two Florida killers facing the nation’s first double execution in 19 years a few hours later won temporary stays.

The Supreme Court rejected Stanley’s final appeal at 11:47 p.m. EDT, 18 minutes before he was led into the death chamber at Jackson Diagnostic Center south of Atlanta

Stanley, 28, a black high school dropout with an IQ of 81, was pronounced dead at 12:24 a.m. EDT.

He was the 21st man executed in the United States and the second in Georgia since the Supreme Court dropped its ban on the death penalty in 1976.

Stanley’s grandmother, mother, brother and sister-in-law joined 17 other people in a grassy field outside the prison. At 12:15 a.m., the appointed time of Stanley’s death,. a woman took a candle from his mother’s hands and blew it out.

Stanley had no last words and refused to see a minister several times in the ours before he died. He was impassive and expressionless before the death hood was dropped over his face and the switch was thrown to send the deadly voltage through his body.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta denied a stay of execution for Stanley earlier Wednesday.

Late Wednesday the 11th Circuit Court granted a temporary stay for Jimmy Lee Smith, 30, and 2 hours later U.S. District Judge Eugene Spellman, of Miami, granted a reprieve for David Lee Washington, both of whom were scheduled to die one after the other beginning at 7 a.m. in the electric chair at Starke, Fla.

Both stays were temporary, however, and the Florida death warrants allow their executions up to noon on Friday.

Spellman granted Washington a stay until 6:59 a.m. EDT Friday to give the Atlanta appeals court time to consider his case. The Atlanta court ordered a 9:30 a.m. hearing Thursday on Smith’s appeal.

Washington, 34, a former choir boy, high school drummer and confessed triple murderer whose 1976 violent rampage over 9 days stunned Dade County, was to have died first, followed by Smithj 7 a.m. Thursday.

Florida has already executed six men since 1976, more than any other state.

Washington is black; Smith is white.

Stanley was taken to Georgia’s ‘death watch’ cell next to the death chamber at noon Wednesday, and authorities said his only request was for vanilla ice cream. His last meal also consisted of squash and peanut butter cookies

In Florida, officials said Washington and Smith were in holding cells about 12 feet apart next to the death chamber. They could not see each other but could communicate if they wished. Apparently they had little to say to each other, according to prison spokesman Vernon Bradford.

Stanley and another man, Joseph Edward Thomas, 28, were convicted of the robbery-murder of Clifford Floyd, a prominent Bainbridge, Ga., insurance man who was robbed, beaten, shot and buried alive in 1976.

Thomas is still on Georgia’s death row.

‘He’s innocent. As a child he was always looking to help someone,’ said Eliza Yulee, the grandmother who reared Stanley, as she brushed back tears at a news conference at Atlanta City Hall Tuesday.

Mrs. Yulee said she once told Ivon to kill a chicken for a family meal, but he couldn’t do it. She said he refused to retaliate when he was provoked by school bullies.

Stanley’s father deserted the family before he was born, and his mother often treated him coolly, according to documents filed with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/07/12/Ivon-Ray-Stanley-a-killer-who-buried-his-victim/6101458452800/

Alpha Stephens Georgia Execution

Alpha Stephens was executed by the State of Georgia for a robbery murder. According to court documents Alpha Stephens would shoot and kill the victim when he and Claude Sampson were robbing his sons home. Both Alpha Stephens and Claude Sampson would be arrested. Claude Sampson would be sentenced to life without parole however would take his own life in 1982. Alpha Stephens who had a long criminal record was sentenced to death. Alpha Stephens would be executed by way of the electric chair however it would take additional jolts to end his life. Alpha Stephens would die on December 12 1984

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Double-murderer Alpha Otis Stephens was executed in Georgia’s electric chair today with two 2,080-volt surges 10 minutes apart, shortly after he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrist.

Prison officials said one surge of electricity was expected to carry out the execution order and Stephens was ‘brain dead’ after the first surge.

But witnesses saw Stephens’ fingers move and his head rolled back and forth after the first surge.

‘It was almost like he was trying to wake himself up,’ said reporter Lee Howell. ‘Then he started breathing. We counted 23 breaths and they were deep breaths. It was obvious he was alive.’

Stephens, who received his first jolt at 12:18 a.m. and his second at 12:28 a.m., was pronounced dead at 12:37 a.m. EST.

The wooden electric chair at Georgia’s Diagnostic and Classification Center had been tested five times this week. Although officials only planned to give Stephens one jolt, they insisted ‘there apparently was no malfunction.’

The 39-year-old career criminal with 19 felony convictions cut his wrist in the final hours after he had been shaven to prepare for the execution. Prisons spokesman John Siler said the cut was not life threatening.

‘Oh Jesus, no way,’ said Siler. ‘It has gotten out of hand. He had smuggled a small disposable razor in and had a small cut, a slight scratch on his left wrist.

‘It was minor — very little blood. It was hardly life threatening.’

Siler said it was not known how Stephens got the razor.

‘We are looking at that now,’ he said. ‘He had just been shaved. He must have smuggled it in.’

Stephens made no final statement, but wrote his last victim’s son earlier this week asking to be forgiven.

Stephens, who received his first jolt at 12:18 a.m. and his second at 12:28 a.m., was pronounced dead at 12:37 a.m. EST.

‘Oh Jesus, no way,’ said Siler. ‘It has gotten out of hand. He had smuggled a small disposable razor in and had a small cut, a slight scratch on his left wrist.

‘It was minor — very little blood. It was hardly life threatening.’

Siler said it was not known how Stephens got the razor.

‘We are looking at that now,’ he said. ‘He had just been shaved. He must have smuggled it in.’

Stephens made no final statement, but wrote his last victim’s son earlier this week asking to be forgiven.

Stephens, who began his criminal career at age 16 with an auto theft, was sentenced to death for the 1974 execution-style slaying of Roy Asbell, who caught Stephens and an accomplice robbing his son’s home.

The Rev. Charles Asbell said Stephens wrote him and ‘asked that I would forgive him and I did.’ But he added: ‘He chose to be wicked; he chose to be sinful. I feel the sentence should be carried out.’

Stephens became the 31st convict executed in the nation since 1976. His attorneys made two last-ditch appeals Tuesday to the Supreme Court and his final plea was denied at 11:22 p.m.

The Rev. Murphy Davis, a Presbyterian minister and director of Southern Prison Ministry in Atlanta, spent more than five hours with Stephens before the execution.

‘This is not justice,’ she said. ‘This is just an easy way for the state to answer its problems

She said Stephens was an abused child ‘who was on his own from about the age of six.’

Stephens, who had a childhood of poverty and was known as ‘Sonny Boy,’ had a final meal of fried shrimp, french fries, tossed salad, Coke and pecan pie. He was not visited by his family or his common-law wife and teenage daughter.

The last meal Stephens had outside prison was a $40 steak, champagne and beer dinner in Savannah in August 1974 just hours after he robbed and killed the elder Asbell with two point-blank shots through the ear.

Asbell was slain just two days after Stephens escaped from the Houston County Jail with a hacksaw he bought from a trusty for $20.

Claude Sampson, Stephens’ accomplice in the Asbell robbery-murder, was sentenced to Georgia’s State Prison in Riedsville and committed suicide there in 1982.

Stephens, who spent most of his life in prison, also had been sentenced to five life terms fo crimes ranging from killing country store owner Louise Mercer in 1973 to armed robbery and kidnapping.

After killing Asbell and leaving his body in an abandoned house used to store hay, Stephens then fled to Savannah in the dead man’s car, picked up a woman and they shared a nine-course dinner at a hotel restaurant.

But Stephens drank so much champagne and beer he passed out on a park bench. He was arrested when police awakened him and the .357 magnum that killed Asbell fell from his coat.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/12/12/Double-murderer-Alpha-Otis-Stephens-was-executed-in-Georgias-electric/6160471675600/

John Smith Georgia Execution

John Smith was executed by the State of Georgia for a double murder committed during a robbery. According to court documents John Smith and two accomplices would lure the victim to a remote part of Georgia. The victim would show up with his new wife and they both would be shot and killed. John Smith would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. John Smith would be executed by way of the electric chair on December 15, 1983

John Smith More News

John Eldon Smith, a 53-year-old insurance salesman convicted of a double murder, went to his death on this brilliantly blue morning after nine years of appeals. He was the second man to be executed this week.

Mr. Smith made no final statement of his own and refused to select the witnesses for his electrocution. His face betrayed no emotion as he walked to the death chamber, and he complained only that the straps of the chair were being pulled too much as guards fastened them. ”Hey, there ain’t no point in pulling so tight,” he said.

The swiftness of the procedure, which one witness described as ”antiseptic and sterile,” emphasized the quickening pace of executions in the United States. Mr. Smith was the 11th man to be executed since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the fifth to die this year and the second in two days.

”We have crossed a threshold,” said Henry Schwarzschild, director of the capital punishment project of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. Entering a New Period

”Before the mid-70’s, there were one or two executions a year,” he said. ”We have entered a new period where executions are utterly likely. They will be resumed in some substantial number not because, once having smelled blood, society is bloodthirsty, but for technical reasons because of the way the legal system operates.”

Mr. Schwarzschild said he did not foresee any more executions this year but estimated 30 to 50 inmates would be put to death in 1984 after exhausting their appeals.

Witnesses to the execution said that before his execution, Mr. Smith asked the Rev. Robert Wise to read his final statement. The Roman Catholic priest recited from II Corinthians: ”Indeed we know when the earthly tent in which we dwell is destroyed, we have a dwelling prepared by God.”

He concluded, ”Father, I abandon myself in your hands.”

Mr. Smith uttered only a few words. He said, ”thank you, Father,” to the priest and made the remark to the guards who were strapping him in.

The prison where Mr. Smith died is beside an expressway leading to Atlanta, and seems less remote than the backwoods Louisiana State Penitentiary where Robert Wayne Williams was put to death before dawn Wednesday. But ultimately their lives were extinguished in the same way. The Sentence Carried Out

A square of material was draped over Mr. Smith’s face and a leatherstrapped cap containing an electrode was placed over his head.

So tightly was he strapped to the chair, witnesses said, it was difficult to tell when the three unidentified executioners pressed three small buttons, one of which sent 2,000 volts of electricity through the condemned man’s body for two minutes. According to prison tradition, none of the executioners knew if his was the lethal button. Mr. Smith’s body tensed as if he had taken a deep breath; his right hand curled upward, the thumb touching the index finger. The hair on his arms and legs curled.

The body remained in the chair for six minutes before the prison warden, Ralph Kemp, along with two physicians and the guards, all with name tags removed, entered to examine the corpse and pronounce the man dead.

Outside the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center, protestors who had been videotaped by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation sang ”Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Mr. Smith drew the death sentence after he was convicted of shooting his wife’s former husband, Ronald Akins, and Mr. Akins’ new wife, Juanita, on Aug. 31, 1974 in a plot to collect $20,000 in insurance money. The plot was said to have been concocted by Mr. Smith’s wife, Rebecca Machetti, and carried out by Mr. Smith and another man, John Maree, both of whom are serving life sentences.

According to court testimony, Mr. Smith hoped to impress the Mafia with his prowess as a hit man

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/16/us/georgia-man-becomes-second-executed-in-26-days.html

Andrew Cook Georgia Execution

Andrew Cook was executed by the State of Georgia for a double murder that took place in 1995. According to court documents Andrew Cook would shoot and kill two people Grant Patrick Hendrickson, age 22, and Michele Cartagena, age 19 who he picked at random. Andrew Cook would ultimately confess to his father, who was an FBI agent. Andrew Cook would be convicted and sentenced to death. Andrew Cook would be executed on February 21, 2013 by lethal injection

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Andrew Cook apologized to his family and the families of the two people he murdered 18 years ago, but he didn’t ask for their forgiveness.

“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me,” Cook said a few moments before he was executed by lethal injection late Thursday for killing two Mercer University students on Jan. 2, 1995. “I can’t even do it myself.”

He said it was senseless to kill Grant Patrick Hendrickson and Michele Cartagena. Cook, then 20 years old, picked the couple at random when he came up on them parked at “the Point,” a small peninsula that juts into Lake Juliette. He fired 14 shots from an AR-15 and another five from a 9 mm Ruger at them and then dragged Cartagena about 40 feet from the car, partially undressed her, knelt between her legs and spit tobacco juice on her in an attempt to make it look like a robbery and sex crime, prosecutors said.

He thanked his family for “their support, for being with me, and I’m sorry I took so much from you all.”

At 11:22 p.m. Thursday, the 38-year-old Cook became the first person to be executed in Georgia using only one drug, a massive dose of pentobarbital. The state abandoned the three-drug combination it had used on 29 other men because two of the drugs were becoming impossible to secure.

His death came almost 5 1/2 hours after his final appeal was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court just before 6 p.m. He had been scheduled to die at 7 p.m. Thursday, but the state put his lethal injection on hold until the Supreme Court denied his appeal just before 11 p.m.

His lawyers asked for mercy by claiming Cook had changed during his time in prison and was a good man, that he had become spiritual while on death row and he wanted to help the families of his victims.

Hendrickson’s mother, Mary, told a Macon television station that the 18-year wait has been hard.

“I think that’s what it was: the devil’s work,” she told WMAZ-TV. “When all that is going on, I was just thinking to myself: ‘Well, the devil is not going to win. He’s not going to win over my heart. He is not going to win.’”

Two days earlier, Warren Hill won a stay of his execution set for Tuesday evening with a claim that that he had new evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he is mentally ill. Hill was serving a life sentence in 1990 for killing his 18-year-old girlfriend four years earlier when he beat to death his cellmate, Joseph Handspike, with a nail-studded board, saying “you ain’t bad now.”

In Cook’s case, it was harder to connect him to his victims than it was to connect Hill to Handspike because Cook had no connection to Hendrickson or Cartagena. Investigators had a report of a Honda CRX seen driving off. They knew the types of weapons used. And they had recovered DNA in the tobacco juice spit on Cartagena’s leg.

Investigators contacted Cook two years after the crime as they were seeking DNA samples from area people who owned weapons like those used to kill Hendrickson and Cartagena.

To get a reluctant Cook to cooperate, an investigator asked Cook’s father, then an FBI agent, for help. Andrew Cook confessed to his father, and then John Cook relayed the details to investigators. The father also testified at his son’s trial.

According to pleadings filed in the final days before the execution, John Cook “did what he thought was right” and he never expected his son to get the death penalty.

But instead of Cook “harboring bitterness toward his father,” his attorneys wrote, “Andy has embraced him … Andy has never wavered in his support for his father.

https://www.ajc.com/news/breaking-news/andrew-cook-apologized-before-his-execution/0OIWh7AT7IQSlmOqdOgfSO/

Robert Holsey Georgia Execution

Robert Holsey was executed by the State of Georgia for the murder of a Sheriff Deputy. According to court documents Robert Holsey was escaping from an armed robbery when he would shoot and kill Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy Will Robinson. Robert Holsey was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Robert Holsey would be executed by lethal injection on December 9, 2014

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A death-row inmate in Georgia was killed by lethal injection Tuesday night after a last minute plea to the the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay was rejected.

Lower courts had already rejected Robert Wayne Holsey’s legal team’s arguments that an intellectual disability and the fact that his trial lawyer was an alcoholic meant he should get a reprieve. And Georgia’s high court had denied Holsey’s request for a stay on Tuesday afternoon as the clock ticked down to his execution for the 1995 murder of sheriff’s deputy Will Robinson.

“Robert Wayne Holsey is an intellectually disabled African-American man who was represented at trial by a chronic alcoholic who was more concerned about avoiding his own criminal prosecution than defending his client against the death penalty,” his current lawyer, Brian Kammer, had said before the execution, which was carried out at 10:51 p.m. ET — an hour after the court rejected the plea.

Kammer had argued that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in May that found Florida’s standard for proving intellectual disability was too strict also applied to Georgia’s rules. “We will keep challenging the burden of proof that Georgia requires. It is too heavy,” Kammer said late Tuesday night. “It’s the heaviest burden of proof in the law and guarantees that the mentally ill will be executed.” Holsey’s appeals had also argued that he did not have effective legal counsel because his lawyer admittedly was drinking up to a quart of vodka a day

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/lethal-injection/georgia-executes-robert-holsey-after-supreme-court-denies-iq-appeal-n264921