After Delay, Inmate Is Executed in Georgia

The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to delay the execution of Robert Wayne Holsey, rejecting his argument that the state's unusually strict standard for judging mental disability is in violation of guidelines set by the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Holsey, who killed a deputy sheriff in Baldwin County after robbing a convenience store in 1995, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Holsey's lawyers sent a final appeal to the Supreme Court in Washington while officials at the state prison in Jackson prepared for the execution. Mr. Holsey requested eight pieces of fried chicken for his final meal, according to the Department of Corrections.

Mr. Holsey's case received wide attention in part because his lawyer at his trial in 1997 later admitted to drinking up to a quart of vodka a day at the time and was trying to avoid theft charges that would soon land the lawyer in prison.

An appeals court found that the defense had been deeply inept during the penalty phase of Mr. Holsey's trial. His lawyer failed to present potentially mitigating details about Mr. Holsey's history of abuse as a child and did not press arguments that he is intellectually disabled.

Mr. Holsey has an I.Q. of around 70, on the borderline of a disability that could make his execution illegal.

But the Georgia Supreme Court later said that despite flaws, the death penalty could stand.

At issue in the new appeal that was rejected on Tuesday was Georgia's requirement that intellectual disability be proved 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' The rule is stiffer than that in any other state and makes it nearly impossible, legal experts said, to declare as disabled a person who is near the borderline and only partly able to manage daily life.

Mr. Holsey's current lawyers argued this week that the Georgia standard violated United States Supreme Court rulings, especially one in May that held that states cannot create 'an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed.'

But the appeal was rejected by the State Supreme Court, with two of seven members dissenting.

'By making it virtually impossible to prove intellectual disability, the Georgia standard reduces the Eighth Amendment's ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities to a nullity,' Brian Kammer of the nonprofit Georgia Resource Center, one of Mr. Holsey's lawyers, said in a statement Tuesday.

Many legal experts predict that the United States Supreme Court will at some point accept a case like Mr. Holsey's, or another one now pending in Georgia, and declare the state's tough standard to be unconstitutional. But until it does so, the Georgia justices in essence said on Tuesday, the state will not be deterred from carrying out executions based on existing law.