JACKSON -- With a video camera recording his last moments, Andrew Grant DeYoung was executed Thursday night at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center for killing three family members.
DeYoung was declared dead at 8:04 p.m., fewer than 15 minutes after the process began. Lying prone, he barely moved throughout the execution. His parting words were: "I'm sorry for everyone I've hurt."
For the first time in Georgia, a videographer was present in the execution chamber, documenting DeYoung's death and his reaction to a new three-drug lethal injection that anti-death penalty activists said caused unnecessary pain and suffering. The videographer, accompanied by a woman taking notes, stood off to the side and was barely visible to witnesses.
DeYoung, however, only blinked his eyes and swallowed repeatedly, and showed no violent signs in death. He was checked by a nurse for consciousness shortly into the execution, a new procedure put in place. At 8:22 p.m., he was taken from the prison in a black Butts County Coronor van.
It is believed this was the first execution involving lethal injection that was videotaped in the nation. In 1992, a California execution was recorded on video, but the gas chamber was in use. The execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was shown live over a closed-circuit broadcast from an Indiana prison to victims or family members of the deceased watching in Oklahoma City.
DeYoung was put to death for murdering his parents and his 14-year-old sister in 1993. A brother, 16, escaped the mayhem after hearing the commotion and running from the family's east Cobb County house to safety at a neighbor's home. DeYoung was captured within hours.
A Kennesaw State University student and 19 at the time, DeYoung went on the killing spree apparently thinking it would enable him to receive $480,000 in inheritance for a business venture.
His federal and state appeals exhausted, DeYoung was scheduled for die by lethal injection on Wednesday night, but his execution was delayed 24 hours by the Department of Corrections in an attempt to further litigate the videotaping issue. More than three hours past the original appointed time, the Department of Corrections and Attorney General Sam Olens decided to postpone the execution. Olens said the state needed more time to address the videotaping because it was a situation new to Georgia.
The Department of Corrections had the authority to stop the execution because the agency was given a week-long “window” in which DeYoung had to be executed, and it didn't run out until next Tuesday.
Hours before Thursday's execution, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane rejected the state's attempt to have the Georgia Supreme Court review her ruling that allowed the execution videotaping.
Lane, overseeing the appeal of death-row inmate Gregory Walker, had ordered the recording of DeYoung’s execution after hearing claims the state’s lethal injection process caused unnecessary pain and suffering. The execution videotaping was the first in almost two decades nationally, since it was permitted in California. No other states with the death penalty currently allow it.
DeYoung’s was the second execution for Georgia in which a new anesthetic, pentobarbital, was part of the lethal three-drug cocktail. The switch to pentobarbital was necessary when sodium thiopental was no longer produced. Capital punishment opponents insisted the new anesthetic is unsafe, insisting the drug-induced comas were not deep enough to shield the condemned from the excruciating pain that comes when the other two drugs are injected, with paralytic pancuronium bromide followed by potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
DeYoung’s lawyers contended there were problems with the June 23 execution of Roy Blankenship, the first man in Georgia to die from a lethal injection using pentobarbital.
Witnesses reported that Blankenship jerked his head several times early in the procedure though his movement and breathing slowed within minutes. Prison officials said those movements came before the anestietic had taken place.
Walker's attorneys asked the Fulton County judge to order DeYoung’s execution videotaped. Lane agreed but said the tape had to be immediately placed under court seal. The state Supreme Court supported that decision.
Still, the state feared those images could be leaked and argued in court filings that there was a “credible risk of public distribution." They also warned of security problems if the camera operator were allowed inside the death chamber and just a few yards from DeYoung on the gurney.
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