DAY ONE

Death still arbitrary

• Of Georgia's 132 most heinous murderers over a recent 10-year span, only 29 of them landed on death row.
• Fifty of the worst killers avoided death by pleading guilty. Some got life sentences and will be eligible for parole.
• A killer's chances of facing the death penalty increased when the victim was white.

The cases | Video: The victim's father

By BILL RANKIN, HEATHER VOGELL, SONJI JACOBS and MEGAN CLARKE

Two men begged a ride from a Wal-Mart shopper in Milledgeville. Minutes later he was dead, shot once in the head. The killers sit on death row.

Two men begged a ride from a college student at a Tifton nightclub. Minutes later he was dead, shot four times in the stomach and chest. The killers are serving life in prison and will be eligible for parole.

Two exceedingly similar crimes, just a few months and 135 miles apart. Two starkly different outcomes.

The murders illustrate what a two-year investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has revealed: Getting the death penalty in Georgia is as predictable as a lightning strike. Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the death penalty nationwide after finding it was arbitrary and capricious in Georgia.

It still is. Reforms that persuaded the high court to reinstate the death penalty have fallen far short of the state's promises, the Journal-Constitution has found.

• Horrible murders are sometimes treated more leniently than lesser crimes. Reginald Acres, for instance, avoided death for viciously stabbing and killing his wife, infant daughter and a pregnant relative. But David Aaron Perkins is on death row for stabbing a drinking buddy and crushing his skull with a whiskey bottle.

• For 25 years, Georgia's Supreme Court has flubbed a critical duty, repeatedly citing cases that had been overturned on appeal to justify other death sentences. (Day Four of this series will explore this issue in depth.)

• More prosecutors and juries are rejecting lethal injection in favor of life without parole. Since 2000, juries have decided against death in two of every three sentencing trials. The trend makes each remaining death sentence more out of step with punishment for similar crimes.

The newspaper's investigation explored the darkest depths of human behavior. Court records told tales of torture, mutilation, child murder — the kinds of cases that give cops and jurors nightmares. They were also, the newspaper found, the kinds that often didn't get the death penalty.

"It's like a roulette wheel," said former Georgia Chief Justice Norman Fletcher. "Arbitrariness is a weakness of the death penalty."

The Journal-Constitution found 1,315 murder cases from 1995 through 2004 that could have been prosecuted for death.

But prosecutors pursued a death sentence for only one in four of those killers. Only one in 23 of them landed on death row.

In that decade, DAs did not seek death for 375 murder cases involving rape, torture or maiming, or multiple killings — circumstances that could warrant a death sentence, the Journal-Constitution found.

Juries sent other killers to death row for crimes that involved a single gunshot and a single victim.

"It would make as much sense just to execute every 10th or every 100th murderer [as] it would be to figure out the rhyme or reason for why we're picking the ones to get the death penalty," said Atlanta defense attorney Jack Martin.

The newspaper, working with University of Maryland criminologist Ray Paternoster, analyzed 10 years of murder convictions. Among the findings:

Geography matters. Killers' sentences often depended on where they killed. A murder in Clayton County, for example, was 13 times more likely to bring death penalty prosecution than a similar crime a few miles away in Fulton.

Race matters, too. Statewide, prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek death when the victim was white.

The nature of the crime matters. Statewide, the geographic and racial disparities were more pronounced in prosecutors' handling of murders that involved armed robbery.

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