ATLANTA (AP) – As his scheduled execution nears, lawyers for a Georgia man are asking the state parole board to spare his life and challenging the constitutionality of his sentence in court.
Scotty Garnell Morrow is set to be put to death Thursday at the state prison in Jackson. He was convicted of murder in the shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend Barbara Ann Young and her friend Tonya Woods at Young’s Gainesville home in December 1994. A third woman was also shot but survived.
The parole board, the only authority in Georgia that can commute a death sentence, was holding a closed-door hearing Wednesday to consider his case for clemency.
Attorneys for Morrow, 52, argued in a petition for clemency that emotionally fueled, spontaneous killings such as the ones for which he was convicted are rarely punished by the death penalty. They said commuting his sentence to life in prison, with or without possibility of parole, would bring his punishment more in line with those of other people convicted of murder under similar circumstances.
Separately, in a petition filed Tuesday in Butts County Superior Court, his lawyers also argued that Morrow’s death sentence is unconstitutional because it was improperly imposed. They said the judge in the case ultimately decided which of the two murders deserved the death penalty, a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled must be made by a jury.