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| Marcus Wellons |
Marcus Wellons, 59, convicted of raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl in 1989, was executed in Georgia on Tuesday at 11:56 p.m. ET.
The
execution began at 10:41 p.m., and that Mr. Wellons was pronounced dead
more than an hour later, at 11:56 p.m. Media witnesses described a
shorter procedure.
A
journalist who witnessed the execution, Rhonda Cook of The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, said a prison official fainted shortly before Mr.
Wellons was declared dead. But she said there had been no other
abnormalities.
Mr.
Wellons apologized for his crime, Ms. Cook said. “I ask and hope that
you will find peace with my death,” she quoted him as saying. He later
said, “I’m going home to be with Jesus.”
The
execution took place well after the scheduled start time of 7 p.m.
State officials had delayed the execution of Mr. Wellons, 58, while the
United States Supreme Court considered his final appeal.
Marcus Wellons is the first inmate put to death in the U.S. since Oklahoma’s botched execution in April.
Wellons was denied clemency by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday. Later that day, a federal judge also denied Wellons’s request for a stay of execution.
Hours before the state was scheduled to kill him, Wellons’s lawyers filed an appeal at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to stay the execution on the grounds that the state’s refusal to disclose details about its lethal injection drugs violated his constitutional rights.
In 2013, Georgia’s governor signed into law a bill that classified all information about people or entities who manufactured, supplied and compounded drugs as a “confidential state secret” that could not be disclosed even under judicial process.
Wellons’s lawyers have argued that their client’s Eight Amendment rights, which protected him from cruel and unusual punishment, would be violated if the state did not disclose the name of the compounding pharmacy that supplied the custom-mixed pentobarbital to be used in his execution. They also said Wellons had a right to know the qualifications of the officials responsible for carrying out the execution. The appeal highlighted the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma which occurred because of the improper placement of the IV line in Lockett’s veins.
Wellons becomes the first man to be executed in Georgia since the state’s new secrecy law. It is also the first time the state uses a single large dose of pentobarbital obtained from a compounding pharmacy for an execution.
In his Monday ruling denying the stay of execution, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr., said that the State Department of Corrections had a “compelling need” to keep the drugs used a secret due to the shortage of drugs it might have faced otherwise. He said that the state “acted in good faith” when it chose the company that produced pentobarbital and in appointing the execution team. He also said that Wellons’s concerns about the pentobarbital and the person placing the intravenous lines into him amounted to “mere speculation.”
