DEATH PENALTY

Georgia Executes Oldest Man on Death Row

Hours after SCOTUS denied request for stay.

Brandon Astor Jones, the oldest man on Georgia’s death row, was executed early Wednesday, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas denied a request for a stay in his scheduled lethal injection. The 72-year-old had been on death row for 18 years after being convicted in 1997 for the slaying of a convenience-store worker 18 years prior. Lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to block the execution over Jones’s challenge to the state law that keeps secret the company responsible for manufacturing the drugs used in the state’s lethal injections or because the death sentence is disproportionate to the crime. On Tuesday, the state supreme court turned down an appeal that argued his sentence was disproportionate to the crime while a federal appeals court also declined a challenge to the state’s execution secrecy law.