The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Inmate set for execution still insists he’s no killer
Cromartie appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a stay.
Georgia death row inmate Ray “Jeff ” Cromartie waited Wednesday night as a lastditch frenzy of appeals over his fate played out in the legal system.
The 52-year-old was set to receive a lethal injection of pentobarbitol Wednesday at 7 p.m. But while Georgia schedules executions for that hour, the state does not proceed until all courts have weighed in, which usually puts the actual time of death well into the night.
After the federal appeals court in Atlanta rejected Cromartie’s request for a stay of execution shortly before 5 p.m., Cromartie appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a stay that is highly unlikely.
If Cromartie is indeed executed, he will die amid uncertainty and contention. He has always insisted he was not the person who pulled the trigger in the 1994 South Georgia convenience store robbery and murder that sent him to death row.
On Monday, one of Cromartie’s co-defendants, Thad Lucas, released an affidavit saying he overheard their other co-defendant, Corey Clark, confess to being the shooter.
Lucas, who was the getaway driver in the robbery in Thomasville, did not mention Clark’s alleged confession at trial or in a recent interview. Lucas said in the affidavit that he originally didn’t think telling the truth would do any good. State officials argued his statement changes nothing, because Lucas acknowledges he didn’t see the shooting and, thus, can’t know who killed 50-year-old Richard Slysz.
And the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ruling Wednesday rejecting Cromartie’s request for a stay, disagreed with Cromartie’s lawyers’ contention that Lucas’ recent statement shows their client is innocent of malice murder and his case should be reopened.
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit noted just three days before Slysz was fatally shot in the head, Cromartie committed an almost identical crime against another store clerk in the same town.
There was also testimony at trial that Cromartie picked out which store to rob in the Slysz killing, the court said.
Nevertheless, Slysz’s daughter, Elizabeth Legette, supports Cromartie’s requests for new DNA testing. Cromartie’s attorneys say the testing could prove it was Clark who shot the clerk, not Cromartie. At trial, Clark testified that Cromartie fired the gun.
Courts have denied Cromartie’s DNA testing request in recent weeks, upsetting the victim’s daughter.
“In the course of the past few months, I have not been treated with fairness, dignity, or respect, and people in power have refused to listen to what I had to say,” Legette wrote in a statement released Tuesday. “I believe this was, in part, because I was not saying what I was expected to say as a victim.”
After 25 years of failed court fights, Cromartie seemed resigned in recent visits with family.
Stepbrother Eric Major talked to him through a metal screen at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison outside Jackson, which houses the execution chamber. “He was comforting us,” Major told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He was never a very emotional person, but he was always a caring person.”
Major didn’t need to square the image of the convicted murderer as a caring person, because he never believed his stepbrother was guilty.
The brothers grew up mostly around Houston, Texas, where they had little supervision at home. “We kind of were raising ourselves,” Major said.
Cromartie seemed to Major like an average kid with a job at McDonald’s and a love for music. The stepbrothers got into trouble here and there before Major’s mother brought him to live with her in Alabama. At the mother’s urging, Major went to college.
Cromartie, meanwhile, joined the Army and got kicked out for reasons he never disclosed to Major. Cromartie ended up in Thomasville, his mom’s hometown, and Major stayed in Alabama, where he would later become a state representative.
As the execution neared, Major thought of how his path diverged from his stepbrother’s. “But for the grace of God, I would be Jeff,” Major said.