ATLANTA — The daughter of the lone woman on Georgia’s death row is asking the state parole board to grant her mother life in prison instead of the death penalty for plotting to have her father killed — even though she says her dad’s death was “the most painful experience of my life.”
Kelly Renee Gissendaner, 46, is scheduled to die Wednesday at the state prison in Jackson. She was convicted of murder in the February 1997 killing of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner. Prosecutors said she conspired with her boyfriend, Gregory Owen, to kill her husband. If the execution happens, it will be the first time Georgia has executed a woman since 1945.
The State Board of Pardons and Paroles, the only entity in Georgia authorized to commute a death sentence to life in prison, has set a clemency hearing for Tuesday.
Gissendaner told police her husband didn’t return home Feb. 7, 1997, from dinner with friends in Lawrenceville, just outside Atlanta. His burned-out car was found two days later. His body was found about a week after that, roughly a mile from the car, in a remote wooded area. He had been stabbed several times.
“My father’s death was extremely painful for many people, but I’ve recently concluded that in many ways I was the person who was most impacted by his murder,” Kayla Gissendaner, who was 7 when her father was killed, wrote in a statement submitted to the board by her mother’s lawyers.