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GEORGIA (USA): MARCUS RAY JOHNSON EXECUTED
November 19, 2015: Marcus Ray Johnson, 50, White, was executed in Georgia.
Johnson was sentenced to death in Dougherty County for the March 24, 1994 murder of Angela Sizemore.
Johnson and Sizemore met at a bar shortly after midnight on March 24, 1994.
They drank, danced and kissed before leaving for a nearby empty lot where they had sex.
Johnson told police he remembered little because he had drank so much tequila, but he did recall punching Sizemore because she wanted to cuddle.
He insisted, however, that she was alive when he left her sitting in the field, crying.
Her body was found around 8 a.m. inside her SUV, which was parked behind an apartment complex on the other side of town from the bar.
She had been stabbed 41 times. Johnson's lawyers said there was little physical evidence connecting the 2 - a drop of her blood on his jacket (which Johnson said got on him when he punched Sizemore) and the remnants of their sexual relations. His lawyer said there would have been copious amounts of blood on his clothes if he had stabbed her, and his fingerprints and other DNA would have been inside her SUV if he had driven it across town.
He also challenged the eyewitnesses who said they saw him in the neighborhood where Sizemore's Suburban was found.
Johnson becomes the 4th inmate put to death in Georgia this year and the 59th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1983. Johnson becomes the 27th and final inmate to be put to death this year in the USA, and the 1,421st overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
The 27 executions continues a downward trend in the USA since 2010, and represents the fewest amount of executions in the USA since 1991, when the nation carried out 14 executions. The next scheduled execution in the US is set for January 20, 2016, in Texas. (Sources: Atlanta Journal Consitution & Rick Halperin, 19/11/2015)
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