By Rhonda Cook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — Attorneys for condemned murderer Brian Keith Terrell today withdrew an appeal filed last week in Fulton Superior Court because, they said, the issue was better suited for federal court.
While the court appeal is pending, Terrell’s mother and family and friends turned to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to ask for clemency.
Terrell is scheduled to die on Tuesday at 7 p.m. He was originally slated for execution on March 10, one week after the scheduled execution of female death row inmate Kelly Gissendaner, but both lethal injections were called off because of a problem with the lethal injection drugs.
In his appeals, Terrell’s lawyer is again raising questions about the compounded lethal injection drug that Georgia uses in executions.
And the petition to the Parole Board says witnesses who testified against him were wrong about what happened on June 22, 1992, when 70-year-old John Watson was shot and beaten to death moments after leaving his Newton County house for a dialysis appointment.
In the clemency petition, Terrell’s lawyer writes that Jermaine Johnson, Terrell’s cousin and the prosecution’s key witness, lied when he testified and the neighbor who said she saw Terrell at Watson’s house actually saw someone else.
According to testimony, Terrell, just out of prison, stole 10 blank checks from Watson, his mother’s friend. He wrote checks, some to himself, for a total of $8,700. When Watson discovered the theft, he told Terrell’s mother he wouldn’t press charges if her son returned most of the money. Two days later, Terrell killed Watson.
In the court appeal filed last week, attorney Bo King focused on the compounded lethal injection drug, pentobarbital made by an unknown pharmacist. He said the problem with the drug earlier this year was never fully explained.
Both of those executions were put on hold temporarily when the compounded lethal injection drug, pentobarbital, turned cloudy and clumps formed in the liquid.
Gissendaner was executed in September and Terrell’s was rescheduled for Tuesday after the Department of Corrections determined the problem with the drugs could be blamed on cold storage. But King’s lawyer argues that the Georgia Department of Corrections never truly discovered what caused the problem, and continues to insist cold temperatures were to blame even though the agency could not recreate the problem.
King wrote in the appeal that information obtained under the Georgia Open Records Act indicated there were problems with two batches of pentobarbital, not just one, suggesting the cloudiness might not be an isolated incident.
King says there is no way to determine the problem because of the state law that keeps most of that information secret.
“It is only a matter of time before the drugs — compounded by an unknown pharmacy using unknown ingredients in unknown circumstances — become defective again,” King wrote.
The sources of Georgia’s lethal injection drug and the state secrecy shrouding that information, are issues that have been raised several times in appeals if other condemned killers. Repeatedly the courts have upheld the use of pentobarbital and have ruled that Georgia can keep secret its drug sources to protect pharmacists from public pressure.
Copyright 2015 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution