Georgia sets execution for man convicted... 45 years ago

A Georgia man convicted of killing an 8-year-old girl and raping a 10-year-old girl more than 45 years ago is scheduled to be executed next month, state officials said.

Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Timothy Ward announced in a Wednesday news release that Virgil Delano Presnell Jr. is to be put to death at 7 p.m. on May 17 at the state prison in Jackson. Presnell, 68, is accused of abducting and attacking the 2 girls as they walked home from school in Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, on May 4, 1976.

He was convicted in August 1976 on charges including malice murder, kidnapping and rape and was sentenced to death. His death sentence was overturned in 1992 but was reinstated in March 1999. Presnell staked out a Cobb County elementary school on May 3, 1976, and saw a 10-year-old girl walking home on a wooded trail. He returned the next day, and abducted the girl and her 8-year-old friend when they came walking down the trail, according to evidence at trial outlined in a Georgia Supreme Court ruling.

He drove the 2 girls to a secluded wooded area, made them undress and raped the older girl, the ruling says. The younger girl tried to run as he took her back to the car, but Presnell caught her, shoved her face underwater in a creek and drowned her.

Presnell then locked the older girl in his car trunk, began driving and dropped her in a wooded area when he got a flat tire. Throughout, Presnell had forced her to engage in sex acts multiple times, the ruling says.

Presnell had told the girl he’d return, but she heard sounds from a nearby gas station and walked there. She described Presnell and his car with a flat tire to police, who found him changing his tire at his apartment complex near where he’d left the older girl.

At first, Presnell denied everything but later he led police to the 8-year-old girl’s body and confessed, the ruling says. Police found a handgun and child pornography showing young girls in his bedroom.

Attorneys for Presnell have said in court filings that Presnell was born to a teenage mother who drank and smoked heavily throughout her pregnancy. Presnell suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome that damaged his brain and kept him "from ever developing into a functioning, responsible adult," his lawyers argued.

"Coupled with a childhood marked by ongoing violence, alcoholism, and sexual and physical abuse, it is not at all difficult to see how he developed into an adult with serious disturbances which, left unchecked and untreated, could produce tragic results," his lawyers wrote in a filing arguing that his sentence was unconstitutional.

Presnell would be the 1st person executed by the state of Georgia since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The last person executed by Georgia was Donnie Cleveland Lance in January 2020. Georgia uses an injection of the sedative pentobarbital to carry out executions.

Source: The Associated Press, Staff, April 28, 2022

🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

Louisiana's First Nitrogen Execution Reflects Broader Method Shift

Facing imminent execution by lethal gas earlier this week, Jessie Hoffman Jr. — a Louisiana man convicted of abducting, raping and murdering a 28-year-old woman in 1996 — went to court with a request: Please allow me to be shot instead. In a petition filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on March 16 seeking a stay of his execution by nitrogen hypoxia, a protocol that had yet to be tested in the state, Hoffman requested execution by firing squad as an alternative.

'No Warning': The Death Penalty In Japan

Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite criticism over how it is carried out. Tokyo: Capital punishment in Japan is under scrutiny again after the world's longest-serving death row prisoner, Iwao Hakamada, was awarded $1.4 million in compensation this week following his acquittal last year in a retrial. Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite international criticism over how it is carried out.

Bangladesh | Botswana Woman Executed for Drug Trafficking

Dhaka, Bangladesh – Lesedi Molapisi, a Botswana national convicted of drug trafficking, was executed in Bangladesh on Friday, 21 March 2025. The 31-year-old was hanged at Dhaka Central Jail after exhausting all legal avenues to appeal her death sentence. Molapisi was arrested in January 2023 upon arrival at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, where customs officials discovered 3.1 kilograms of heroin hidden in her luggage. Following a trial under Bangladesh’s Narcotics Control Act, she was sentenced to death in May 2024. Her execution was initially delayed due to political unrest in the country but was carried out last week.

South Carolina | Spiritual adviser of condemned inmate: 'We're more than the worst thing we've done'

(RNS) — When 67-year-old Brad Sigmon was put to death on March 7 in South Carolina for the murder of his then-girlfriend's parents, it was the first time in 15 years that an execution in the United States had been carried out by a firing squad. United Methodist minister Hillary Taylor, Sigmon's spiritual adviser since 2020, said the multifaceted, months long effort to save Sigmon's life, and to provide emotional and spiritual support for his legal team, and the aftermath of his execution has been a "whirlwind" said Taylor, the director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Oklahoma executes Wendell Grissom

Grissom used some of his last words on Earth to apologize to everyone he hurt and said that he prays they can find forgiveness for their own sake. As for his execution, he said it was a mercy. Oklahoma executed Wendell Arden Grissom on Thursday for the murder of 23-year-old Amber Matthews in front of her best friend’s two young daughters in 2005. Grissom, 56, was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. local time, becoming the first inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025 and the ninth in the United States this year.

A second South Carolina death row inmate chooses execution by firing squad

Columbia, S.C. — A South Carolina death row inmate on Friday chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets. Mikal Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to murder for killing a police officer in 2004, is scheduled to be executed April 11. Mahdi, 41, had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. He will be the first inmate to be executed in the state since Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death on March 7. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead less than three minutes after three bullets tore into his heart.

Louisiana executes Jessie Hoffman Jr.

Louisiana used nitrogen gas Tuesday evening to execute a man convicted of murdering a woman in 1996, the 1st time the state has used the method, a lawyer for the condemned man said. Jessie Hoffman Jr., 46, was put to death at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, defense lawyer Cecelia Kappel said in a statement. He was the 1st person executed in the state in 15 years, and his death marked the 5th use of the nitrogen gas method in the US, with all the rest in Alabama. Hoffman was convicted of the murder of Mary "Molly" Elliott, a 28-year-old advertising executive. At the time of the crime, Hoffman was 18.

USA | Federal death penalty possible for Mexican cartel boss behind 1985 DEA agent killing

Rafael Caro Quintero, extradited from Mexico in 2022, appeared in Brooklyn court as feds weigh capital charges for the torture and murder of Agent Enrique Camarena NEW YORK — The death penalty is on the table for notorious drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, the so-called “narco of narcos” who orchestrated the torture and murder of a DEA agent in 1985, according to federal prosecutors. “It is a possibility. The decision has not yet been made, but it is going through the process,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy said in Brooklyn Federal Court Wednesday.

Texas Death Row chef who cook for hundreds of inmates explained why he refused to serve one last meal

Brian Price would earn the title after 11 years cooking for the condemned In the unlikely scenario that you ever find yourself on Death Row, approaching your final days as a condemned man, what would you request for your final meal? Would you push the boat out and request a full steal dinner or play it safe and opt for a classic dish such as pizza or a burger? For most of us it's something that we'll never have to think about, but for one man who spent over a decade working as a 'Death Row chef' encountering prisoner's final requests wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

South Carolina plans to carry out a firing squad execution. Is it safe for witnesses?

South Carolina plans to execute a man by firing squad on March 7, the first such execution in the state and the first in the nation in 15 years. But firearms experts are questioning whether South Carolina's indoor execution setup is safe for the workers who will shoot the prisoner and the people who will watch. Photos released by the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that the state intends to strap the prisoner, Brad Sigmon, to a metal seat in the same small, indoor brick death chamber where South Carolina has executed more than 40 other prisoners by electric chair and lethal injection since 1985.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog