The State Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday denied clemency to Roy Willard Blankenship who is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection June 23.
Blankenship sits on death row for the 1978 burglary, rape and murder of 78-year-old Sarah Mims Bowen in her Savannah apartment. The board, which has the power to commute death sentences, had stayed Blankenship's execution earlier this year to allow for DNA testing. It reviewed Blankenship's plea for clemency during a hearing Monday.
An expert who reviewed the testing conducted by the GBI and a private lab said it could neither exclude nor identify Blankenship as Bowen's assailant.
In filings with the parole board, Blankenship's lawyers said that while the DNA testing did not provide conclusive results, hair and blood evidence "not matching Mr. Blankenship were present on Bowen's body."
"We are, in short, left with a meaningful doubt that Mr. Blankenship is in fact guilty of Ms. Bowen's murder," the filing said, noting that Blankenship has been a model prisoner on death row for two decades.
Executions in Georgia have been on hold since March, when the Drug Enforcement Administration seized the state's supply of sodium thiopental.
Lawyers for a death-row inmate had questioned whether the state illegally obtained its stockpile of that drug, which is no longer made in the U.S., from a pharmaceutical company in London last year.
Corrections recently announced it is substituting pentobarbital for sodium thiopental. Pentobarbital, used as a sedative, will be used as the first of three lethal-injection drugs, followed by pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer that stops breathing, and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest.
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