Lawyers seek to delay Georgia execution set for next week

ATLANTA — Lawyers for a Georgia man scheduled to be put to death next week for killing an 8-yearold girl 46 years ago are trying to delay the execution.

Virgil Delano Presnell Jr., 68, is scheduled to die May 17 at the state prison in Jackson by injection of the sedative pentobarbital. He killed the 8-year-old girl and raped her 10-year-old friend after abducting them as they walked home from school in Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, on May 4, 1976.

He was convicted in August 1976 on charges including malice murder, kidnapping and rape and was sentenced to death. His death sentence was overturned in 1992 but was reinstated in March 1999.

Lawyers representing the Federal Defender Program, which represents Presnell, filed the lawsuit and an emergency motion Monday in Fulton County Superior Court. They say the setting of his execution date violates a written agreement reached last April with the office of state Attorney General Chris Carr that temporarily put executions on hold during the coronavirus pandemic and established conditions under which they could resume.

The lawsuit says the agreement said that, with one named exception, executions wouldn’t resume until six months after three conditions had been met: the expiration of the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency, the resumption of normal visitation at state prisons and the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine “to all members of the public.”

The judicial emergency ended in June, but prisons are still using a modified visitation policy and children under 5 still can’t access the vaccine, according to the lawsuit which names Carr and the state of Georgia as defendants.

A spokeswoman for Carr declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

The agreement said that once the conditions were met, the state intended to seek an execution date for Billy Raulerson, who was sentenced to death for the May 1993 killings of three people in south Georgia, and that Raulerson’s lawyers would be given at least three months notice after the conditions were met, the lawsuit says. The attorney general’s office said it wouldn’t seek the execution of anyone else on death row until at least six months after the conditions were met, the suit says.