ATLANTA -- A federal appeals court granted a stay of execution Tuesday for John Eldon Smith, barely 40 hours before he was to be electrocuted for murdering two people in hopes the Mafia would hire him as a hit man.
The court routinely granted him permission to file an appeal as a pauper and set an Aug. 29 deadline for additional briefs in the case.
After more than four hours of oral arguments, the Circuit Court granted the stay in a one-page order. Judges Paul H. Roney and Charles W. Hatchett voted to grant the stay, but Judge James C. Hill dissented.
At the Georgia Diagnostic and Treatment Center near Jackson, 50 miles south of Atlanta, prison officials had been testing electrical circuitry of the white wooden chair where Smith was scheduled to die at about 10 a.m. Thursday.
In the nation's last execution, that of John Louis Evans in Alabama April 22, three massive jolts of electricity were required to stop the condemned man's heart.
'We don't want what happened in Alabama all over again,' said prison spokesman Fred Steeple.
Smith would have been the eighth man executed since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1977.
Smith was to have been moved from death row to a lone holding cell, about 20 feet from the chair but separated from it by a solid door, late Tuesday night for the 36-hour 'death watch.' Steeple said Smith made no special requests, declined to hold a news conference and refused to pick five witnesses.
Attorney John Charles Boger told the appeals court the state improperly covered up a tacit agreement with codefendant John Maree, whose testimony put Smith and his wife, Rebecca Akins Smith, under death sentence in early 1975.
Mrs. Smith won a new trial last year on grounds women were excluded from the grand jury and the trial jury in her case, and last month was given two life sentences.
Smith, who adopted the name Anthony Isalldo Machetti, was convicted of the Aug. 31, 1974, shotgun murders of Ronald Akins and his bride of 20 days, Juanita Knight Akins, at a construction site near Macon. Akins was the ex-husband of Mrs. Smith and prosecutors said she masterminded the slayings to collect $53,000 in insurance benefits her former husband held for their three daughters.
Maree, a former Fort Myers, Fla., insurance agent, confessed the slayings and said Smith told him his wife had suggested he adopt an Italian name and commit a murder to get a job as a Mafia 'hit man.' Maree is serving two life sentences at the Metro Correctional Institution near Atlanta and will be eligible for parole in November.
