High court denies stay of execution

Ruling ends appeals for convicted killer of Atlanta officer.

JACKSON — Gregory Lawler, 63, who shocked and horrified Atlantans in October 1997 when he gunned down two police officers, was facing execution late Wednesday after the United States Supreme Court denied a stay of execution shortly after 11 p.m.

The court’s action cleare the way for Lawler to get a needle filled with a fatal dose of the sedative pentobarbital.

His lethal injection had been scheduled for 7 p.m., but Georgia would not move forward until all courts had weighed in, which usually puts the actual time of death well into the night and sometimes into the early morning hours of the next day.

The Georgia Supreme Court announced shortly before 7 p.m. that it had denied late defense requests to halt the execution. The U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling a few hours later.

Lawler was convicted in the winter of 2000 and condemned to die for murdering Officer John “Rick” Sowa moments after Sowa and his partner, Pat Cocciolone, had walked Lawler’s drunk girlfriend to the door of the apartment she shared with Lawler.

Cocciolone, who was wounded in the attack, managed to call for help as her partner lay dead.

Lawler’s attorneys have tried to save him by arguing that it was only in recent weeks that Lawler learned he had autism. They contend the disorder leaves him “with diminished capacities that reduce his culpability in a manner akin to intellectually disabled and juvenile offenders.” Georgia law prohibits executing juveniles and those who are intellectually disabled.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected that argument Tuesday, voting to deny his clemency petition just an hour after hearing from those who wanted Lawler’s death sentence carried out.

The double shooting on Oct. 12, 1997, at a Buckhead apartment near the intersection of Lindbergh Drive and Piedmont Avenue was major news in metro Atlanta.

After meeting with the parole board on Tuesday, Howard said Atlanta police officers are still shaken by what happened to Sowa and Cocciolone that Sunday night. “This is something people will never forget,” Howard said.

Sowa, 28, and Cocciolone, then 38, were responding to a report of a man hitting a woman. They found Lawler trying to pull his drunk girlfriend, Donna Rodgers, to her feet from a curb behind a pawn shop. According to testimony, Lawler walked home while the officers attended to Rodgers. Sowa and Cocciolone then drove the intoxicated woman to the apartment she shared with Lawler.

Lawler greeted the officers with obscenities and demanded that they leave. After Sowa blocked Lawler from closing the door, Lawler grabbed an AR-15 propped by the door and fired armor-piercing bullets at the fleeing officers.

Both officers were shot multiple times, yet Cocciolone was able to call for help. Sowa and Cocciolone were wearing bullet-proof vests. Their guns were still in their holsters.

Lawler let Rodgers leave the apartment, then held off police for six hours. He surrendered early the next morning after he cut his long hair, shaved, and changed shirts.

Testifying at his trial, Lawler insisted he was justified to shoot the officers because he felt threatened. And Lawler repeated that claim in his recent clemency petition.

Lawler believed he needed to fight for his life, his lawyers said. They blamed his fears on his then-undiagnosed autism.

Lawler misreads faces and body language; and other people, in turn, misread him, the defense team wrote.

“Despite his obvious intelligence, there is something about how Greg interacts with others that is both alienated and alienating,” his lawyers wrote. “His flat affect. His digressions into lengthy, obsessive monologues on topics that interest him, all delivered in a rushed monotone that occasionally erupts into anger. And underlying it all, an almost palpable anxiety.”

Lawler is often “mistakenly perceived as cold, callous or remorseless,” his lawyers wrote.

Lawler’s execution would be the seventh in Georgia since January, more than any other year since capital punishment was reinstated nationwide in 1976. Georgia executed five inmates last year and in 1987.

Gregory Paul Lawler was convicted of killing Atlanta police officer John Sowa in 1997. He was scheduled to be executed at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Officer John R. Sowa was a two-year veteran of the department when he was gunned down by Lawler during a domestic disturbance call.

Pat Cocciolone is a former Atlanta Police officer who was severely injured in 1997 when she was shot six times as she answered the call with Sowa.