Death row inmate not allowed beer for last meal

The state pardons and paroles board on Wednesday rejected the condemned inmate’s request for more time to analyze DNA evidence.

He is scheduled to die at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Angela Sizemore, who he had met at a west Albany bar named Fundamentals, in the early hours of March 24, 1994.

As his lawyers are racing for a last ditch effort to have the execution delayed or commuted, Johnson saw his own personal request denied: beer for his last meal. “He was the most deserving of the death penalty”.

A Butts County Superior Court judge on Wednesday rejected a constitutional challenge to Johnson’s sentence and conviction and declined to stop his execution. Thirty-five prior to Johnson were put to death by lethal injection.

Gissendaner was the first woman executed in Georgia in 70 years after being sentenced for the murder of her husband in 1997. They drank, danced and kissed before leaving for a nearby empty lot where they had sex. They say that as a result, the case relied upon eyewitnesses who identified Johnson as being in the area shortly before Sizemore’s body was found, even though studies have shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. She was stabbed 41 times with a small, tiresome knife.

Johnson’s lawyer repeated in court filings on Tuesday what he has argued for several years that Johnson is innocent and was convicted on sketchy evidence.

“I didn’t kill her intentionally if I did kill her”, he told police.

Kammer said new evidence suggests Sizemore’s murder was “tied to her involvement in illegal drug trafficking on the night of her death”.