An attorney for a man scheduled to be executed next week asked the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to spare Marcus Ray Johnson because he did not murder Angela Sizemore, a woman he met in 1994 in an Albany bar just hours before her bloody and battered body was found in her SUV.
Brian Kammer outlined in a petition for clemency filed on Tuesday the "highly circumstantial case" that ended with a conviction and death sentence for the 50-year-old Johnson, who blacked out on many details of that early morning because he was drunk.
Johnson told police he and Sizemore had sex but he left her sitting in a field, crying, after he punched her in the nose when she insisted on cuddling.
Kammer said the semen found on Sizemore was the only physical evidence linking her to Johnson as well as his admission.
“Significant doubts about Mr. Johnson’s guilt warrant this board’s merciful intervention,” Kammer wrote.
The Parole Board will hear from Johnson's lawyer the day before he is to be executed on Nov. 19. The Parole Board has commuted five death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole since 2002. In that time 31 people have been executed by the state.
Johnson, who is the first of seven men who could be put to death in Georgia in the next few months, came within hours of being executed in 2011 but a Daugherty County judge stopped it so there could be DNA testing on newly discovered evidence. There was a problem with the testing but the courts did not allow for additional examination.
According to prosecutors, Sizemore was intoxicated when she walked into the Fundamentals bar just after midnight on March 24, 1994, where she found Johnson shooting pool.
They drank shots of tequila, danced some and then spent a bit of time in a booth kissing before they left together. Both were drunk, witnesses said.
A few hours later, a man walking his dog discovered Sizemore’s body in her SUV, parked behind an apartment complex that was on the other side of the Flint River and miles from Fundamentals.
About that time, Johnson said, he was waking up in his front yard, where he had passed out after walking home. A neighbor saw Johnson still wearing the same clothes he had on at the bar.
Police found a small amount of blood on his leather jacket that Johnson said got on him when he punched Sizemore.
Sizemore had been stabbed 41 times and was sodomized with a limb from a pecan tree.
Kammer wrote that kind of assault would have left “copious amounts of blood … on her killer and his clothing. Yet no such evidence was found on Marcus Ray Johnson’s person, clothing or belongings when he was arrested.”
Another question Kammer raised in his petition was the validity of the testimony of four eye witnesses. One of them, for example, identified Johnson for the first time during a pre-trial hearing four years after the murder; he was sitting at the defense table and wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Kammer said there were concerns that came to light last year about Tony Kallergis one of the first prosecution witnesses. Kallergis and his girlfriend had gone to a funeral and then dinner with Sizemore before she went to Fundamentals. The girlfriend testified in 2014 that Sizemore and Kallergis were in the drug business together, and Kallergis had paid Sizemore $3,000 that night for a recent delivery. The cash was not found.
Kallergis, through his attorney, denies he was ever involved in any drug business and denies he made any payment of any sort to Sizemore. Furthermore, he said Kallergis has no connections with any activity related to Sizemore’s death.
“It is well within the realm of possibility that her murder was bound up with her activity selling marijuana in Albany, given that it occurred immediately after a sale worth thousands of dollars,” Kammer wrote.
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