Georgia executes Marcus Ray Johnson, fourth person state has put to death this year

Marcus Ray Johnson, who was convicted for the 1994 killing of Angela Sizemore after meeting her in an Albany bar, was executed last night at 10:11 p.m in Jackson, Ga. Johnson was the fourth person to be executed by the state this year.?
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?“We live in a murderous state, this state of Georgia,” said Murphy Davis, a minister at Open Door Community Church, at a vigil on the steps of the Gold Dome last night.
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?Georgia is one of only 14 states that has carried out the death penalty since 2010. While 31 states have yet to abolish the death penalty, states in the South carry out the most executions.
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?Johnson was sentenced to death despite inconclusive physical evidence. Johnson’s DNA was not found on the vehicle tied to the murder — the lab, in their testing of 13 additional samples as a result of Johnson’s 2011 stay of execution, found only that he “could not be excluded from any of the DNA profiles.” 
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????The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, the only entity authorized to commute an execution in the state, denied Johnson’s stay of execution this week, declining to allow further DNA testing.
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?That same day, the Georgia Supreme Court also denied Johnson’s request to appeal a decision made by the Superior Court in Butts County, where the execution took place at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison. The Superior Court ruling again dismissed Johnson’s claims that new evidence showed the eyewitness testimony presented at the trial was unreliable.
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?Johnson also claimed to the Butts County Superior Court that the “trial and appellate counsel were ineffective for failing to allege that the state’s evidence was insufficient to overcome every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.” This claim was dismissed by a rule that bars bringing claims that could have been brought up during appeals or the initial state habeas proceeding.
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?Thursday’s execution follows that of Kelly Gissendaner, who was executed on Sept. 30 for a murder she herself did not commit but rather planned with her boyfriend at the time — a case that Amnesty USA says highlights the arbitrary application of the death penalty.
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?Gissendaner’s execution was delayed in March due to the cloudy appearance of the lethal injection drug at the time and concerns of violating the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. The delay created an eight-month gap in which no executions took place in Georgia. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of appeals last month, there are now six inmates on death row who have exhausted their appeals and are expected to have their execution scheduled soon.
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?In Georgia, the race of the defendant and the race of the victim are “predictors” of who is sentenced to death, according to the American Bar Association. The legal organization says people who are accused of killing a white person are 4.56 times more likely to be issued the death penalty than those accused of killing a black person.
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?While the number of executions that are conducted and death sentences handed out in the country are declining, the United States continues to execute its citizens at among the highest rate in the world, falling behind only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Roughly two-thirds of the nations in the world have stopped using the death penalty in law or in practice.
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?Dick Rustay, who has been living at the Open Door Community on Ponce de Leon Avenue since 1985, regularly visits inmates on Georgia’s death row. The Idaho native has been protesting the use of the death penalty in the state since he arrived 30 years ago. Rustay, like most in attendance, attended yesterday’s vigil with members of his church. When asked why he came, his answer was simple: “I think basically we’re all guilty. And I think that’s God’s decision to make.”