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| Georgia high court questions electric chair |
| By CNN |
| Published: 03/19/2001 |
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Georgia's high court wants to address whether death in the electric chair violates the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The action came recently as the court granted a stay of execution to a police officer's killer just hours before he was scheduled to die in the electric chair. The inmate was scheduled to be electrocuted last week at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia, about 50 miles south of Atlanta. He was sentenced to die for the murder of police officer Billy Watson in Columbus, Georgia, in 1976. He is also serving a life term for killing Charles McCook of Macon, Georgia. The reprieve marked the second time in less than a year that Georgia's Supreme Court has halted a scheduled execution. Last August the court granted an indefinite stay to a mentally ill prisoner who had been scheduled to die for the murder of a teen-age girl. Georgia has not held an execution since 1998. Georgia is one of the few states that still relies on electrocution as its main method of execution. Last year it abolished the use of the electric chair for capital crimes committed after May 1, 2000, substituting lethal injections. Writing in the high court's majority opinion, Justice Leah J. Sears noted, 'electrocution offends the evolving standards of decency that characterize a mature, civilized society.' |
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He has blue eyes. Cold like steel. His legs are wide. Like tree trunks. And he has a shock of red hair, red, like the fires of hell. Hamilton Lindley His antics were known from town to town as he was a droll card and often known as a droll farceur. with his madcap pantaloon is a zany adventurer and a cavorter with a motley troupe of buffoons.