Daily Double: Georgia
Add comment November 14th, 2015 Headsman
Though not exactly the capital of capital punishment, the Peach State has a foundational place in the modern death penalty regime.
It was through a case originating in that state, Furman v. Georgia, that the Supreme Court in 1972 scrapped the country’s existing death penalty statutes. Many states then scrambled to rewrite capital statutes to pass constitutional muster, and in 1976 it was the Georgia version that the justices blessed, clearing the way for executions to resume.
Since that time, Georgia has put to death 57 men and (most recently) one woman, and it feels for all the world like it’s manifested a disproportionate affinity for questionable and unusual cases: the recent execution of Troy Davis despite serious doubts about his guilt is only the most current example. Hey, this is the state that once executed Homer Simpson.
To take one example, the discomfiting 1986 execution of a grievously mentally disabled man led Georgia to implement one of the first laws to protect such prisoners from execution … a law which by its very novelty in the 1980s has lately made headlines because it’s subsequently aged into one of the flimsiest and most obsolescent protections in the country.
It was also through the case of Georgia inmate Warren McCleskey that the 1989 Supreme Court rejected racial proportionality review in capital sentencing — and by this rejection signaled the end of an era of judicial reticence for the death penalty. Executions accelerated through the 1990s all across the United States; Georgia’s special twist, it would later emerge, was keeping secret audio recordings of theirs.
As we dial the clock back to 1996, Georgia’s Supreme Court has not yet found the electric chair unconstitutional but aside from that artifact the period, the cases are not so different from those today. These are a far cry from the strangest executions in Georgia’s history, unless the strangeness lies in their very typicality.
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November 14, 1996: Larry Lonchar
November 15, 1996: Ellis Wayne Felker
On this day..
- 1989: Solomon Ngobeni, the last hanged in South Africa - 2019
- 2018: The Sultan of Coins - 2018
- 1879: Charles Drews and Frank Stichler, graveyard insurance - 2017
- 1738: False Tsarevich Alexei - 2016
- 1996: Larry Lonchar, bad gambler - 2015
- 1864: Franz Muller, "Ich habe es getan" - 2014
- 1888: William Showers, "pathetic soul" - 2013
- 1930: Yang Kaihui, Mao Zedong's wife - 2012
- 1960: Phineas Tshitaundzi, the panga man - 2011
- 1963: Four Cubans as CIA spies - 2010
- 1726: The Gypsy outlaws of Hesse-Darmstadt - 2009
- 1817: Policarpa Salavarrieta, Colombian independence heroine - 2008
- 1226: Frederick of Isenberg - 2007
Entry Filed under: Daily Doubles,Themed Sets
Ten grand in the red on gambling debts, Lonchar in 1986 raided the home of the bookie he owed and gunned down that bookie, his female partner, and his two sons. (One of the sons survived by playing dead.)
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