[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GEORGIA

[Rick Halperin]

May 2




GEORGIA----impending execution

Board holds clemency hearing for condemned Georgia inmate


Georgia's parole board on Wednesday was considering whether to grant clemency 
for a condemned inmate set to be executed this week.

Robert Earl Butts Jr. is scheduled to die Thursday evening at the state prison 
in Jackson. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles was holding a closed-door 
clemency hearing to hear arguments for and against commuting the 40-year-old 
inmate's sentence.

The parole board is the only authority in Georgia with the power to commute a 
death sentence.

Butts, 40, and Marion Wilson Jr., 41, were convicted and sentenced to death in 
the March 1996 slaying of Donovan Corey Parks in central Georgia. The two men 
asked Parks for a ride outside a Walmart store and then ordered him out of the 
car and fatally shot him a short distance away. Prosecutors have said Butts 
fired the fatal shot.

Wilson's case is still pending in the courts.

Butts' attorneys asked the parole board in a clemency application filed last 
week to spare his life.

"I think about Mr. Parks and that night every single day, going over it again 
and again in my mind," Butts said in a statement included with his petition. 
"There's no excuse for what I did, and I'm tremendously sorry for what happened 
to Mr. Parks."

His attorneys insisted in the petition that Butts wasn't the shooter. A 
jailhouse witness, Horace May, who testified at trial that Butts confessed to 
being the shooter has now signed a sworn statement saying he made the story up 
out of sympathy for Wilson, whom he also met in jail. Wilson also told May that 
the pair had agreed to steal Parks' car but that Butts believed they would 
release Parks, the statement says.

Butts' lawyers have also filed challenges in several courts.

They argued in a filing in Baldwin County Superior Court, where he was 
originally sentenced, that Butts' execution should be halted and he should be 
resentenced. Given recent trends in sentencing, he wouldn't be sentenced to 
death today so his death sentence is "grossly disproportionate," they argued. A 
judge rejected that argument, and Butt's lawyers filed a notice of intent to 
appeal to the state Supreme Court.

In a petition filed in Butts County Superior Court, where the prison that 
houses death row is located, his lawyers argued that his sentence is 
unconstitutional. He was 18 at the time of the killing and a chaotic and 
troubled childhood stunted his intellectual, social and psychological growth, 
causing his mental age and maturity to lag behind his actual age, his lawyers 
wrote. Executing him would be like executing someone who was younger than 18 
when his crime was committed, and that's not lawful, his lawyers argued.

His attorneys have also consistently argued that his trial lawyers were 
ineffective and failed to thoroughly investigate his case or to present 
mitigating evidence, including a childhood characterized by abuse and neglect 
that could have spared him the death penalty. State and federal courts have 
rejected his appeals, but his lawyers have argued that a Georgia Supreme Court 
opinion published in January and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month in 
Wilson's case open the door for a federal judge to consider his claims of 
ineffective assistance of counsel. A federal judge has rejected those 
arguments.

Butts would be the second inmate executed by Georgia this year. Carlton Gary, 
convicted of raping and killing three older women and known as the "stocking 
strangler," was put to death March 15.

(source: Associated Press)