Post-Furman US execution #153
Georgia execution #15 since reinstatement
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, the 25th of September, 1991, the State of Georgia carried out the execution of 44-year-old Warren McCleskey by electrocution in the electric chair at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center near Jackson, Butts County. McCleskey had spent nearly thirteen years on death row following his conviction for the May 1978 armed robbery and fatal shooting of an Atlanta police officer.
His name became permanently enshrined in American constitutional and legal history through the landmark United States Supreme Court decision McCleskey v. Kemp (1987). In that ruling, the highest court in the nation rejected statistical evidence demonstrating systemic racial bias in capital sentencing, effectively dismantling the final broad-based systemic challenge to capital punishment in the United States. The execution itself concluded amid procedural drama, with McCleskey being strapped into the chair, unstrapped due to an eleventh-hour stay, and then strapped back into the apparatus several hours later after the intervention of the Supreme Court.
The Crime
On the afternoon of Saturday, the 13th of May, 1978, four armed men entered the Dixie Furniture Company on Mercer Avenue in southwest Atlanta, Fulton County, intent on armed robbery. The group comprised 31-year-old Warren McCleskey and three accomplices: Bernard Depree, David Burney Jr., and Ben Wright.
Inside the store, the robbers rounded up the shop employees and customers, forced them to lie face down in a rear storage room, and bound them with tape. While the robbery was underway, 31-year-old Atlanta Police Officer Frank Schlatt, who had been alerted by a silent alarm, entered the front door of the furniture shop.
As Officer Schlatt walked towards the centre aisle with his service revolver drawn, two shots were fired from a .38-calibre revolver. One bullet struck Officer Schlatt in the head and another penetrated his chest, killing him almost instantly. The robbers escaped with several thousand dollars in cash and personal property.
Within weeks, all four participants were apprehended by Atlanta police detectives. One accomplice, Ben Wright, agreed to enter a plea bargain to armed robbery and testify for the prosecution. He claimed that McCleskey had entered the front of the store armed with a pearl-handled .38-calibre Rossi revolver and had discharged the shots that killed Officer Schlatt. The murder weapon was never recovered, but ballistics confirmed that Schlatt had been killed by .38-calibre rounds consistent with a Rossi handgun stolen by McCleskey in a prior burglary.
Trial and Sentence
McCleskey was indicted in the Superior Court of Fulton County on charges of murder and two counts of armed robbery. His accomplices, Depree and Burney, were tried separately and received life sentences.
McCleskey’s trial opened in Atlanta in October 1978. He admitted under oath that he had participated in planning and executing the armed robbery, but steadfastly denied being the gunman who shot Officer Schlatt, maintaining that he had been in a different part of the building when the gunfire erupted.
To counter this, the prosecution introduced the testimony of Ben Wright, along with an inmate named Offie Evans, who had been placed in a cell adjacent to McCleskey at the Fulton County Jail. Evans testified that McCleskey had boasted of shooting the officer. (It was later revealed through undisclosed police records that Evans was a paid informant planted in the cell by police in violation of Sixth Amendment standards, which formed the basis of McCleskey’s later McCleskey v. Zant appeal.)
On the 11th of October, 1978, the Fulton County jury found McCleskey guilty of murder and two counts of armed robbery. Following the penalty hearing, the jury found two statutory aggravating circumstances—that the murder was committed during an armed robbery and involved the killing of a law enforcement officer in the performance of his duties—and returned a unanimous recommendation of death. Formal sentence of death was imposed on the 12th of October, 1978.
The Baldus Study and McCleskey v. Kemp (1987)
McCleskey was transferred to death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson. His state direct appeals were rejected.
During federal habeas corpus proceedings, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) took over his representation and presented a comprehensive statistical investigation conducted by Professor David C. Baldus, Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth. The “Baldus Study” examined over 2,400 Georgia murder cases from the 1970s, controlling for more than 230 non-racial variables.
The study’s empirical findings were stark:
- Defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than those charged with killing Black victims.
- Black defendants convicted of murdering white victims (such as McCleskey) faced the highest statistical probability of receiving a capital sentence.
McCleskey’s attorneys argued under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments that Georgia’s capital sentencing scheme operated with an unconstitutional racial bias.
On the 22nd of April, 1987, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered its ruling in McCleskey v. Kemp. By a narrow 5–4 majority, written by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the Court rejected the claim. While accepting that the statistical data of the Baldus study was valid, the Court held that a defendant must prove purposeful, intentional discrimination in his specific case, rather than demonstrating aggregate statistical disparities across an entire state system. Justice Powell famously cautioned that accepting statistical disparity as a basis for overturning sentences would open the door to widespread challenges across the entire criminal justice process. (Shortly after his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice Powell publicly stated that of all the decisions he had authored, his vote in McCleskey was the one he most regretted.)
A second petition, McCleskey v. Zant (1991), reached the Supreme Court regarding the undisclosed jailhouse informant. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled against him under the “abuse of the writ” doctrine, creating a strict procedural hurdle that barred state prisoners from raising constitutional claims in successive federal petitions if they could have been discovered earlier.
The Night of Execution and the Eleventh-Hour Stays
In September 1991, following the dismissal of all federal appeals, the state issued McCleskey’s death warrant for the 25th of September. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied executive clemency.
McCleskey declined to request a special final meal, choosing to eat the standard prison supper.
What followed on the night of Tuesday, the 24th of September, was an extraordinary series of procedural delays:
- Shortly after 10:00 p.m., McCleskey was shaved, dressed in execution clothing, and escorted into Georgia’s execution chamber.
- He was placed into the state’s solid oak electric chair—known historically as “Old Sparky”—and three leather belts were strapped across his chest and legs.
- At 10:03 p.m., just as the guards were preparing to attach the brass headpiece and leg electrode, the chamber telephone rang. An emergency stay had been issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
- The prison guards unbuckled the leather harnesses, and McCleskey was led out of the chair and returned to his holding cell, where he waited for the next three hours while federal judges conferred by telephone.
Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, the 25th of September, the Eleventh Circuit dissolved its own stay. At 2:40 a.m., the Supreme Court of the United States voted 6–3 to deny a final petition for a stay of execution.
The Execution
At 2:48 a.m., McCleskey was brought back into the execution chamber for the second time.
He walked calmly and sat in the heavy wooden chair. Correctional officers fastened the leather straps securely over his chest, waist, wrists, and ankles. A natural sea sponge soaked in a concentrated saline solution was fitted inside the copper headpiece, which was fastened over his freshly shaved scalp. A secondary electrode was attached to his shaved left calf to complete the electrical circuit.
The viewing curtains were drawn open. Behind the thick observation glass sat official state witnesses, pool reporters, and relatives of Officer Frank Schlatt.
Asked by Warden Gary Deloach if he had any final words, McCleskey spoke calmly into the microphone, expressing no bitterness but re-asserting his innocence of the shooting:
“I’d like to say that my heart goes out to the Schlatt family. I did not kill Officer Frank Schlatt. I was part of the robbery, but I was not the triggerman… I hold no ill will against anyone here tonight. I am at peace with God.”
A black leather death mask was buckled over his face, concealing his features from the witnesses.
At 3:02 a.m., Warden Deloach stepped aside and gave the signal to the anonymous executioner in the adjoining control room. The master switch was closed, sending the first cycle of approximately 2,000 volts at eight amperes surging through McCleskey’s body.
His body snapped rigid against the leather harnesses; his fists clenched tightly and his chest heaved upwards. After several seconds, the current was automatically stepped down to 1,000 volts to maintain cardiac arrest, followed by a secondary surge. Wisps of faint grey vapor rose from the calf electrode as the electrolytic solution heated under the current.
The power was cut at 3:04 a.m., and his body slumped back heavily into the chair against the loosened straps.
Prison protocol required a five-minute cooling period to permit the electrodes to cool before human contact. At 3:10 a.m., two attending physicians unbuttoned McCleskey’s white prison shirt, applied stethoscopes to his chest, and examined his pupils.
At 3:12 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the senior physician formally pronounced life extinct. Warren McCleskey was 44 years of age.
His execution was the 15th carried out in Georgia since the modern era commenced with John Eldon Smith in 1983. In 2001, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that execution by the electric chair constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the state constitution (State v. Dawson), ordering that all subsequent executions in Georgia be carried out by lethal injection, leaving McCleskey’s death as one of the defining milestones of Georgia’s electrocution era.
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