Execution on schedule for tonight

By Christian Boone

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The attorney for Mark McClain has filed motions seeking stays with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Georgia Supreme Court to stop an execution set for tonight.

If the courts reject the petitions, McClain will become the 45th person executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s. He'd be the 23rd put to death by lethal injection.

McClain, 42, was sentenced to death 14 years ago for the 1994 murder of a Richmond County Domino's Pizza store manager.

Seeking money for his girlfriend, McClain shot and killed Kevin Brown, 28, and stole $130 from the store's till.

McClain's attorneys filed a consolidated motion on Monday for a stay of execution with the Georgia Supreme Court. They are also seeking a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court until the high court decides a similar appeal from a condemned inmate in Alabama. If the court rules in favor of the Alabama inmate, the appeal argues, then McClain should be granted similar relief.

Attorney Brian Kammer wrote that his client might have avoided the death sentence had the jury been made aware of "available evidence of Mr. McClain's difficult childhood" and his intoxicated state at the time of the shooting.

Death penalty opponents have scheduled vigils Tuesday across the state, including Jackson and Atlanta.

"We mourn the loss of Kevin Brown, the life taken by Mr. McClain, and our hearts go out to his family in their grief," said James Clark, coordinator of Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "But we ask the state not to respond by taking another life and forcing another family to experience that same loss and grief."

Maintaining some hope for a reprieve, McClain knows only that he'll have chicken and rice, carrots, beans, cornbread and bread pudding for dinner -- the same meal that will be served to the other inmates of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

McClain is scheduled to die at 7 p.m.