Longest Serving Death Row Inmate Executed in U.S.

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By Reuters

Published: 05/08/2003

Carl Isaacs, a mass murderer and the longest surviving death row inmate in America, was executed on Tuesday in Georgia after courts rejected last-minute appeals.
Isaacs, 49, was put to death by lethal injection at a state prison in Jackson, Ga., about 50 miles south of Atlanta. He died at 8:07 p.m. EDT, according to Scheree Lipscomb, a Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman.
'He declined a last statement but asked for a prayer,' Lipscomb said.
Isaacs was sentenced to die in 1974 and again in 1988 for being the ringleader of a group that robbed and murdered farmer Ned Alday and five of his relatives in rural southwestern Georgia in 1973.
Isaacs spent nearly 30 years on death row for the crime.
His defense attorneys had attempted to block the execution, arguing that Isaacs' right to a fair trial was violated at a 1988 retrial when a judge failed to tell defense attorneys that a prayer was not transcribed into the record. As part of the prayer, a minister urged the jurors to do 'God's will.'
Defense attorney Jack Martin said the prayer raised the possibility that religious principles were unconstitutionally injected into the trial. The U.S. Supreme Court and Georgia Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to grant Martin's request for a stay of execution.
Isaacs, who suffered from cancer and wore a colostomy bag, ate a final meal of pork and macaroni, pinto beans, sauteed cabbage, carrot salad, dinner roll, chocolate cake and fruit punch before being led into the death chamber.
Three relatives of the victims were present when a sedative, lung paralyzing drug and the poison potassium chloride were injected into his arms. Last week, Alday family members had said that executing Isaacs was the only way to guarantee justice for the victims.
Ned Alday, his brother Aubrey, Ned's sons Jerry, Chester and Jimmy Alday and Jerry's wife, Mary, were shot to death on May 14, 1973 during a bungled robbery of their mobile home in Seminole County, Georgia, which borders Alabama and Florida.
Mary Alday was kidnapped and raped before being murdered.
The crime horrified Georgians and triggered a national manhunt for the killers. Isaacs, his younger brother Billy, half brother Wayne Coleman and George Dungee, were arrested for the crime one week later in West Virginia.
Billy Isaacs, who was 15 at the time of the murders, agreed to testify against his brother and the two others in exchange for a reduced prison term. Carl Isaacs, Coleman and Dungee were sentenced to death by a Seminole County jury in 1974.
The three men were later granted new trials when a federal appeals court ruled that extensive pre-trial publicity had prevented them from getting a fair trial. Isaacs was sentenced to death again in 1988.
Coleman's and Dungee's sentences were reduced to life in prison.
Isaacs unsuccessfully appealed his conviction in 2001 in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. His attorneys argued then that the jury should have been given the option to sentence him to life in prison without parole but was not.

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