ATLANTA (AP) – Lawyers for a Georgia man set to be executed Thursday for killing his ex-girlfriend and her friend asked the state parole board to spare his life and challenged 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 ex-girlfriend Barbara Ann Young and her friend Tonya Woods at Young’s Gainesville home in December 1994. A third woman also was shot but survived.
After holding a closed-door hearing Wednesday the State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected his clemency request. As is customary, the board did not give a reason for the rejection, saying only that it had reviewed the facts and circumstances of the case.
In seeking clemency, attorneys for the 52-year-old death row prisoner argued that impassioned, spontaneous killings such as the ones Morrow was convicted of are rarely punished by the death penalty. The lawyers said commuting his sentence to life in prison, with or without possibility of parole, would bring his punishment more in line with sentences for others convicted of murder under similar circumstances.
Separately, in a petition filed Tuesday in a county court, the inmate’s lawyers 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.