This undated file photo provided by the Georgia Department of Corrections shows convicted murderer Robert Wayne Holsey. Holsey is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, Dec. 9. A jury in February 1997 convicted Holsey of killing Baldwin County sheriff’s deputy Will Robinson. Holsey’s lawyers say he shouldn’t be executed because his trial lawyer failed to present evidence that could have spared him the death penalty. (AP Photo/Georgia Department of Corrections)The state of Georgia executed 49-year-old Robert Wayne Holsey at 10:51 p.m. in Jackson, Georgia for the 1995 murder of a Baldwin County Deupty Sheriff.
Lawyers for Holsey argue that he’s intellectually disabled and shouldn’t be executed. They say his trial lawyer failed to tell the jury about that disability and other evidence that could have spared him the death penalty.
The State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied a clemency request and the Georgia Supreme Court also declined to halt his execution.
Holsey requested eight pieces of fried chicken for his final meal, according to the Department of Corrections.
In its summary, the Georgia Supreme Court stated that Holsey entered the Jet Food Store in Milledgeville on Dec. 17, 1995 and demanded money at gunpoint. After receiving the cash, he then demanded money from the store’s lottery machine as well, then left in a red Ford Probe.
The clerk called police with a description of the car, and four minutes later Holsey was stopped by Deputy Sheriff Will Robinson.
Holsey shot Robinson in the head as the deputy approached the car.
After other deputies spotting the car, they gave chase but Holsey escaped and switched cars. However, he was apprehended soon after.
He was sentenced to death after a trial, but was granted relief on appeal after the court found that he received ineffective assistance of trial counsel. However, the Georgia Supreme Court reinstated Holsey’s death sentence, and he was denied relief in his remaining appeals.
Holsey’s case received wide attention in part because his lawyer at his trial in 1997 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 Holsey’s trial. His lawyer failed to present potentially mitigating details about Holsey’s history of abuse as a child and did not press arguments that he is intellectually disabled.
Holsey has an IQ 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.
Holsey’s current lawyers argued this week that the Georgia standard violated U.S. 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 Holsey’s lawyers, said in a statement Tuesday.
Many legal experts predict that the U.S. Supreme Court will at some point accept a case like 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.