GEORGIA (USA): ROBERT EARL BUTTS JR. EXECUTED

May 4, 2018:

Robert Earl Butts Jr., 40, Black, was executed.
Butts was declared dead by a prison warden at 9:58 p.m. after the compounded barbiturate pentobarbital was injected into his body.
Prison officials said he had declined to take a sedative.
Butts was convicted along with 41-year-old Marion Wilson Jr. in the March 28, 1996 slaying of Donovan Corey Parks, 24, an off-duty prison guard. Baldwin County juries in separate trials found sufficient evidence to sentence both men to death because Parks was killed during the commission of an aggravating felony, armed robbery.
Butts was sentenced to death on November 21, 1998. The case of Wilson (Sentenced to death on November 7, 1997) is still pending. Butts' attorneys insisted in a clemency application to the parole board that he wasn't the shooter, and didn't expect Parks to be killed. They also said a death sentence was "grossly disproportionate," and unconstitutional because although he was 18 at the time of the killing, his mental age and maturity lagged behind his actual age, it would be like sentencing a juvenile to death.
He was the second Georgia inmate executed this year, the 72nd person executed in Georgia since the state resumed executions in 1983, the 10th in the United States, and the n° 1475 since USA resumed executions in 1977.