The state Board of Pardons and Paroles today denied condemned murderer Daniel Anthony Lucas' plea for clemency.
Unless the courts stop his scheduled execution, Lucas will be put to death tomorrow evening for the 1998 murders of a Middle Georgia father and his children.
The board spent about 3 1/2 hours with Lucas' lawyers this morning. In the afternoon, the local prosecutors, detectives and the widow of the man he murdered spoke to the five Parole Board members, taking about 1 1/2 hours. The former district attorney, Fred Bright, and the widow and mother of the children murdered, Gerri Ann Moss, were on the telephone with the board while about 10 others were in the room when they made their pleas that Lucas be executed at 7 p.m. tomorrow.
Lucas’ lawyers filed a petition for clemency last week but they did not file an court appeal until this afternoon.
They wrote in the clemency petition that Lucas was sorry he killed Steven Moss, 15-year-old Kristian Moss and 11-year-old Bryan Moss. His lawyers also wrote that Lucas now practices Buddishm and he wants to spend the rest of his life helping other inmates.
Lucas' appeal was filed in the Superior Court in Butts County, where Death Row is located, about 31 hours before his scheduled lethal injection. If he is put to death, Lucas will be the fifith person Georgia has executed in less than three months.
In the court filing, Lucas’ lawyers complained that jurors were not told about his abusive upbringing or about his addictions. The appeal also said that while Lucas was an adult when he committed the three murders, he should still be considered ineligible for the death penalty because even at the age 19 he remained very much a juvenile; state law and the federal courts prohibit the death penalty for anyone who was younger than 18 when they committed their crimes.
His lawyers wrote in the appeal prosecutors’ portrayal of Lucas “as a mature adult at the time of the crimes was profoundly misleading. … Adolescents do not magically become ‘adults’ once they turn 18. Rather, they continue to be vulnerable to peer pressure and risk-taking behavior just like people under 18 years. Indeed, neuroscience has shown that adolescent brains do not fully mature until a person is in his mid-20s.”
In the afternoon, Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney Stephen Bradley, the head prosecutor for Jones County, and investigators who found Lucas and his accomplice and heard their confessions detailed the crime for the five board members.
Bradley said he could not repeat what others said during the meeting but said Gerri Ann Moss and other family described the “deep impact” the murders had, had on them and the difficulty they have had trying to “stop being scared.”
Lucas and Brandon Rhode, 18 at the time, were sentenced to die for murdering three of the four members of the Moss family on April 23, 1998.
The 11-year-old boy, just home from school, saw Lucas and Rhode ransacking his house so he picked up an aluminum baseball bat and went inside to confront the two.
First Lucas and Rhode shot and wounded Bryan. They took him to a back room when they say his older sister get off the school bus. They shot and killed Bryan after securing Kristin in a chair.
Then they killed her too.
Moments later, their father, a truck driver, came home from work and he, too, was shot. His body fell at his daughter’s feet and that is where his wife and the children’s mother found him about an hour later.
Rhode was executed on Sept. 27, 2010. After setting an execution date for him, officials had to delay it almost a week because he attempted suicide by cutting his own neck and wrists.
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