The Georgia Supreme Court denied a final-day effort to save condemned killer Emanuel Hammond from lethal injection, a day after a Fulton County judge rejected a request for time to investigate the state's supply of a lethal injection drug.
That same judge, Michael Johnson, in a separate hearing Tuesday afternoon, once again rejected a request by Hammond's lawyers to postpone the execution.
Johnson considered a new lethal injection lawsuit filed Tuesday afternoon questioning the constitutionality of using drugs that come from a source in question. Hammond's lawyers can again appeal this latest ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court.
Hammond is scheduled to be executed at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Ga.
There were two issues on which the Georgia Supreme Court ruled Tuesday afternoon.
One was Hammond’s claim his legal defense at trial was lacking, which the justices rejected.
The other involved questions about sodium thiopental , which Department of Corrections records show came from Dream Pharma, a company that operates out of the back of a storefront driving school in London.
Hammond's lawyers said the state may be using “illegally imported drugs.”
Johnson had denied Hammond's request for time on Monday.
Sodium thiopental, a sedative, is the first of three drugs administered in a lethal injection in Georgia. That is the same drug that is in short supply nationwide to the extent that executions may have to be delayed.
Hammond, 49, was convicted of murdering Julie Love 23 years ago. Even though police suspected she was dead, the disappearance of the27-year-old child fitness instructor was treated as a missing person for a year after she vanished from a Buckhead street on July 11, 1988.
Her body was found 13 months later in an illegal dump in northwest Atlanta only after Hammond’s girlfriend came forward with details of events leading up to the shooting death.
Love was on her way home from a business meeting when she ran out of gas and started walking along Dover Road. Hammond; his girlfriend, Janice Weldon; and his cousin, Maurice Porter offered her a ride. She declined, said she lived nearby and started walking up a driveway. But they saw Love turn around after they drove off so the three went back for her.
Hammond jumped out with a sawed-off shotgun and dragged Love into the car.
The three tried and failed to get money using Love's ATM card. Porter raped her and then Hammond shot her in the face.
Porter pleaded guilty to murder, rape and other charges and is in the state prison system serving a life sentence. Weldon was given immunity and not prosecuted.
-- Reporter Bill Torpy contributed to this article.
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