JACKSON, Ga. -- A second Georgia death-row inmate faces execution this week, following the electrocution of a mentally retarded murderer, deemed by a clemency board to be intelligent enough to know right from wrong.
Jerome Bowden, 33, was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. Tuesday only 33 minutes after the Supreme Court refused to grant him a reprieve.
Another death-row prisoner, Son Fleming, is scheduled to be executed Friday for the murder of a Ray City police chief. If he dies, it will be the first time Georgia has executed two people in one week since it resumed capital punishment in 1983.
Before a two-minute jolt of 2,002-volts surged through his body, a calm Bowden thanked prison officials at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center for 'taking such good care of me' and asked a chaplain for prayer.
'I hope by my execution being carried out, it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong,' he said.
Witnesses could not tell if the 'wrong' meant capital punishment or the 1976 robbery-slaying of Kathryn Stryker, 55, of Columbus, the crime for which he died.
Bowden's lawyers had tried to stop his execution, Georgia's seventh and the nation's 61st since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, by claiming the prosecutor had dismissed all black potential jurors in his case for no reason.
The lawyers also argued Bowden, who had an IQ of 59 at age 12, was mentally retarded and did not understand his crime or punishment.
But Bowden was given an intelligence test Monday, showing he had an IQ of 65, and the five-member state Pardons and Paroles Board quickly retracted a 90-day reprieve ordered last week after determining he was smart to enough to know the difference between right and wrong when he killed Stryker.
Death penalty opponents and Patricia Smith, an attorney for Bowden and president of the Association for Retarded Citizens of Georgia, criticized the state for executing Bowden.
Smith said the difference between an IQ of 59 and 65 was insignificant and said Bowden never understood the difference between right and wrong.
Bowden and teenager Jamie Graves were convicted of robbing and killing Stryker, who had hired them to do some yard work. Graves is serving a life sentence.
