A Georgia woman who was executed despite a plea for mercy from Pope Francis sang "Amazing Grace" until as she was given a lethal injection, witnesses said.
Kelly Renee Gissendaner was put to death at 12:21 a.m. Wednesday after a flurry of last-minute appeals failed.
Gissendaner, who was sentenced to death for the 1997 stabbing murder of her husband at the hands of her lover, sobbed as she called the victim an "amazing man who died because of me."
Particularly noteworthy was this paragraph later in the article:
In the hours before her death, Gissendaner pressed a number of appeals, arguing that it was not fair she got death while the lover who killed her husband got a life sentence. She also said the execution drugs might be defective, and that she had turned her life around and found religion while in prison.
I must be missing the argument there that could not have been made many years before last night. It strikes me that the time has long since come to sanction lawyers who intentionally clog the courts and make a spectacle of legal process by bad faith, last-minute, kitchen-sink appeals.
Bill,I agree that some of these garbage, late-filed arguments need to be filed much earlier. But really, IMHO, it seems to me that that the states need go forward with executions if there are no stays in place. I also think that states should not make it easy for service of process. State attorneys general are public servants--they aren't paid to work deep into the night to deal with after working hours multiplicative filings. The absence of a properly served stay order should mean that the execution goes forward at the appointed hour.