Pardons board denies Alderman's clemency bid

ATLANTA -- The state Board of Pardons and Parole today denied clemency for condemned Chatham County murderer Jack Edward Alderman, after hearing from ministers and a school teacher who pleaded for the board to stop his execution tonight.

Board members do not comment on their decisions, which are treated as state secrets.

James Ringer, Alderman’s attorney, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Now, four U.S. Supreme Court justices may be all that stands between Alderman and the executioner’s needle.

Alderman’s attorneys have asked the nation’s highest court to review the case, but the court does not return to session until Sept. 29. If four justices agree to review the case, the court would likely stay the execution until the full court can take it up.

At a clemency hearing this morning, several ministers and a schoolteacher who met Alderman through death row ministry and outreach programs asked the board to spare his life -- if not for innocence then for the fact that he’s become a mentor to inmates and guards, said James Ringer, Alderman’s attorney.

“They told their personal stories of what they’ve gained from knowing Jack,” Ringer said.

Chatham County prosecutors made their case to proceed with the execution by phone today. Barbara Jean Alderman’s family did not attend the hearing.

Alderman, currently the longest-serving death row inmate, is set to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. tonight at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

Prosecutors say Alderman asked friend John Arthur Brown to kill his wife, Barbara Jean Alderman, in return for half of a $20,000 insurance policy on her life. Brown then hit the woman in the head with a wrench at the urging of Alderman, and helped Alderman strangle and submerge her in a bathtub.

The pair them went out for drinks, then put the woman’s body in the trunk of Alderman’s car and dumped it into a creek, prosecutors say.

For 34 years, Alderman has maintained his innocence.

Ringer said the fact that Brown’s testimony helped convict Alderman, and helped earn his release 12 years after the crime in a deal with prosecutors, shows that Alderman’s sentence is unjust, given that both men were convicted of the same crime.

Additionally, jurors did not know Brown benefited from testifying against his accomplice, Ringer said.

Jake Armstrong can be reached at (404) 589-8424 or jake.armstrong@morris.com.

From the Tuesday, September 16, 2008 online edition of The Augusta Chronicle

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