GEORGIA EXECUTION: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

After nearly 40 years on death row, man is finally executed just 10 days before his 73rd birthday

On June 17, 1979, Brandon Astor Jones and Van Roosevelt Solomon burglarized a suburban Atlanta convenience store, shooting a man inside to death. As luck would have it, a police officer happened to be outside the store and heard four shots. He went inside and saw Jones and Solomon standing over the body. He managed to arrest both perps. Jones and Solomon were both sentenced to death later that year.

Solomon was electrocuted on Feb. 20, 1985. Jones lingered on death row for 37 years while the courts heard numerous appeals. On one occasion he was ordered retried because the jury that sentenced him to death had a bible in the jury room while they deliberated his fate. He was again sentenced to death.

The end finally came at 12:46 a.m. Wednesday, when Jones croaked after receiving a single dose of pentobarbital. Jones had been the oldest man on Georgia’s death row, the execution taking place just 10 days before his 73rd birthday.

A flurry of last minute appeals challenging Georgia’s secrecy over who compounded the pentobarbital failed.

According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

It took more than an hour to prepare Jones for his lethal injection. According to a media witness who monitored the setup, it appeared they had to insert an IV into his groin area, which is protocol if the nurses cannot find accessible veins in the inmate’s arms.

Jones fought death. His eyes closed within a minute of the warden leaving the execution chamber, but 6 minutes later his eyes popped open. He looked at a clock on the wall, and then appeared to look at the man who prosecuted him in 1979, former Cobb County District Attorney Tom Charron, who was sitting on the front row.

37 years on death row? Jones was there so long that the veins in his arms had all collapsed. Ah well, better late than never.