Kelly Rene Gissendaner is scheduled to die by lethal injection later this month for persuading her boyfriend to murder her husband.
The court order signed Monday states the execution must happen between 7 p.m. Feb. 25 and noon March 4.
If she is put to death, Gissendaner would become the first woman Georgia has executed since 1945 and its 14th female executed in nearly 300 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Gissendaner was convicted in 1998 of planning the murder of her husband. She wanted him dead, rejected her boyfriend’s suggestion that she file for divorce, and insisted her husband would not leave her alone if he were allowed to live, according to trial testimony.
She spent the evening of Feb. 7, 1997, at a bar with friends while her boyfriend, Gregory Owen — armed with a nightstick and a hunting knife — waited for Douglas Gissendaner at the Gissendaner home in Auburn. The boyfriend and the husband drove to some woods in a rural section of Gwinnett County, where Owen forced Douglas Gissendaner to his knees, knocked him unconscious and stabbed him in the neck eight to 10 times.
Kelly Gissendaner drove up while her boyfriend was still stabbing her husband, according to trial testimony. They left the body in the woods, set Douglas Gissendaner’s car on fire about a mile away and returned to their respective homes.
Douglas Gissendaner’s body was found on Feb. 20, 1997. He was still on his knees.
Owen is serving a life sentence, having avoided the death penalty by helping prosecutors.
The first female executed in Georgia was Alice Riley, who was hanged for murder on Jan. 19, 1735.
Lena Baker, the most recent Georgia woman put to death, was electrocuted on March 5, 1945.
Baker, who was black, was condemned at the end of a one-day trial in Cuthbert after 12 white men convicted her of shooting her white employer with his own gun. The 44-year-old maid said she killed Ernest Knight because he imprisoned her and threatened to shoot her if she tried to leave.
Baker was pardoned posthumously by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles in 2005.
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