Lawyers seek execution delay for woman on Georgia death row

Kelly Gissendaner’s attorney said he will appeal.

Gissendaner was convicted of murder in the February 1997 slaying of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner.

She is scheduled to be executed at 7 p.m. Tuesday. There is clear evidence of that in the reconciliation with her children and the day-in and day-out of how she treats prison staff and her fellow inmates, Kelly’s former professor Jennifer McBride said. Then Saturday former State Corrections Deputy Director Vanessa O’Donnell and Norman Fletcher, former chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, joined the effort, asking the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency.

Gissendaner would be the first woman executed in Georgia in 70 years.

Kelly Gissendaner conspired with a man she was having an affair with to kill her husband, Doug, almost 20 years ago in Gwinnett County.

And because of Owen’s sentence, Fletcher states he believes Gissendaner’s sentence is out of proportion to her role in the crime.

Fletcher said he opposes the death penalty altogether because of the possibility of making irreversible mistakes and because of the cost. “Kelly Gissendaner should not be the first”. “In addition, the process we used at the time to conduct proportionality review was deeply flawed”, he wrote. Over the years, she has helped minister to her prison mates. But Kelly Gissendaner’s children have been pleading for her life. “She can provide hope to the most desperate female offender in a manner no one else could possibly understand”. Owen, who took a plea deal and testified against Gissendaner, is serving a prison sentence.

Gissendaner now has a surprising new ally in her fight. “Really, what she’s done since is nearly not something that needs to be considered”, he said. “But there is no way Kelly is the same person she was back then”.

‘In the process, I saw that my mom had struggled through the years to come to grips with what she had done and face her own horror about her actions’. And she had an on-again, off-again lover in Owen.

But as time went by she yearned for answers.

Gissendaner’s clemency petition already included testimonials from dozens of spiritual advisers, inmates and prison staff who described a seriously damaged woman transformed through faith behind bars.

Kelly’s children say that their father would not want their mother to be executed because he would not want them to endure the pain they did when he died all over again.

Fletcher said he is arguing that Gissendaner should be spared based on “the disproportionate nature of Ms. Gissendaner’s sentence when compared to that of her co-defendant, Gregory Owen, who actually stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death”. In a video released September 19, Dakota and Kayla Gissendaner, who were 5 and 7 when their father died, talk about overcoming intense anger at their mother and the hard journey to forgiving her.

After the problem with the drug in March, the department temporarily suspended executions until a drug analysis could be done.

Her lawyers had filed a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections after her scheduled March 2 execution was called off because of an issue with the lethal injection drug.

There have been 57 men executed in Georgia since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1973.