Nation/World

Georgia carries out country's first execution in more than two months

Georgia executed an inmate early Friday morning, setting a modern record in the state while carrying out the country's first lethal injection in more than two months.

Authorities say they executed John Wayne Conner, who was convicted of murder more than three decades ago, by lethal injection shortly before 12:30 a.m. early Friday, more than five hours after the execution was originally scheduled to occur. The Supreme Court had denied his requests for a stay in orders issued Thursday night, with the most recent order coming about 50 minutes before the execution occurred.

Conner declined a final prayer and didn't record a last statement, state officials say.

This lethal injection ended 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.

The country's shift away from the death penalty – seen most recently last year, when the country executed 28 inmates, the fewest in nearly a quarter-century – has continued this year. On this date last year, the country carried out its 18th lethal injection of the year. Conner became the 15th person executed in 2016.

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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.

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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." The justices also declined another request later, with Breyer again dissenting.

Breyer, who has previously raised the issue of long waits before executions before, wrote in a brief dissent Thursday night that he would have heard the case "for reasons I have previously expressed."

He pointed to some of his earlier filings, including a dissent from May and another from last year, where he questioned the constitutionality of executions following delays of many years. Breyer wrote in his dissent last year — and quoted from it in May — that he believed the modern death penalty's "fundamental constitutional defects" include "unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty's penological purpose."

Earlier on Thursday, the Georgia Supreme Court also 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 execution was scheduled to occur, 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.

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Conner's execution, originally set for 7 p.m. and then delayed by the late-night filings and responses from the Supreme Court, occurred at a Georgia state prison in Jackson, about 50 miles southeast of Atlanta.

This lethal injection was the sixth in Georgia this year, matching Texas for the most in the country in 2016. That also marks 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 set with more than five months still left on the calendar.

The two-month gap between executions that ended early Friday is the longest such lull in the country since a seven-week pause between late April 2014 and mid-June of that year. Some executions were abruptly halted during this window, which followed an execution that went awry in Oklahoma, but during a 24-hour period that June, Georgia became the first of three states to carry out executions.

As fewer states nationwide have carried out executions, those still putting inmates to death have become responsible for an outsize number of lethal injections each year. In 2011, 13 different states executed inmates. Five years later, only five states have executed inmates. The overwhelming majority of executions this year have been concentrated in two places (Texas and Georgia), while three other states – Alabama, Florida and Missouri – have each put one inmate to death.

This death penalty drop-off has come in large part because states where officials say they really do want to execute people simply can't do it. States like Ohio, Florida and Oklahoma – among the country's most consistent practitioners of the death penalty – have been forced to avoid executions.

This isn't for lack of effort or intention in some places. Take Ohio: Between 2001 and 2014, that state executed at least one person every year, a streak that lasted right up until the state's lengthy execution of Dennis McGuire. During his January 2014 lethal injection, McGuire – who admitted to raping and murdering Joy Stewart, a pregnant newlywed, in 1989 – struggled, gasped and choked.

After McGuire's execution and two other bungled lethal injections the same year – all involving midazolam, a sedative – Ohio said it would ditch that drug and use a different combination.

Since there is an ongoing shortage of lethal injection drugs (the reason Ohio had used midazolam and hydromorphone to execute McGuire), Ohio said it would take time to get these drugs and postponed its executionsmultiple times.

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The next execution in the state is currently scheduled for Jan. 12, 2017 – assuming the state can get the drugs. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction told us recently that it "continues to seek all legal means to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out court ordered executions."

Florida, meanwhile, is not able to execute any inmates – and has no idea what will happen to the nearly 400 people on its death row. The Supreme Court struck down the Sunshine State's death penalty statute as unconstitutional earlier this year, prompting Florida lawmakers to revamp the language.

Now the Florida Supreme Court is trying to determine if that higher court ruling is retroactive, which would give every death-row inmate in Florida a life sentence instead.

The same ruling still reverberating in Florida may also have an impact in Alabama. An inmate in Alabama unsuccessfully argued that the death-sentencing system in his state was "virtually identical" to the Florida one struck down, but the Supreme Court rejected this appeal and he was executed. Since then, the Supreme Court has on multiple occasions told Alabama courts to review death-row cases because of the Florida ruling.

Luther Strange, the Alabama attorney general, who called his state's sentencing system "wholly different from Florida's," has argued that the Supreme Court ruling in Florida has no impact on his state, and a spokeswoman from his office said there is no freeze on the death penalty in Alabama.

(In May, an evenly split Supreme Court left a last-minute stay in place for an Alabama inmate scheduled to die by lethal injection. This stay was about his competency to be executed, rather than the sentencing setup in Alabama, and Strange's office says legal proceedings continue in that case.)

Oklahoma continues to have a hold on executions that it began ever since authorities there used the wrong drug in an execution and nearly used an incorrect drug months later. A grand jury report issued in May said that the mistake was because of an "inexcusable failure" by a few people, assailing public officials for behavior described as reckless.

This was the second time in as many years that an execution mishap sparked a probe in Oklahoma. In what remains the most high-profile bungled execution in recent memory, Clayton Lockett, a convicted murderer, grimaced and writhed during his 2014 lethal injection. Officials called off the execution, but he still died 43 minutes later. A state investigation cited problems with the training of the execution team.

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Oklahoma's attorney general said last fall he would not seek any executions until 150 days after the investigation was completed and prison officials say they can follow the Oklahoma execution protocol. As a result, it is still unclear when Oklahoma will resume executions.

If Oklahoma makes it to next year without carrying out a lethal injection, 2016 will mark the first time in 22 years that the state didn't put any inmates to death during a calendar year.

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