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Georgia leads US in executions this year
Tuesday nights would be ninth
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William Sallie
JACKSON — Lawyers seeking to block Tuesday's scheduled execution of a man convicted of killing his father-in-law after a custody fight over a young son have argued a juror lied about her own messy relationship history and swayed fellow jurors to vote for a death sentence.William Sallie should be granted a new trial because of the alleged juror bias, but courts haven't properly considered that evidence because he missed a filing deadline by eight days at a time when he didn't have a lawyer, his lawyers said in court filings.The 50-year-old inmate, who was convicted of murder in the fatal shooting of John Lee Moore in March 1990, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Jackson.After eight executions already, Georgia has put to death more people this year than any other state including Texas with seven.Sallie's first conviction and death sentence were overturned because his attorney had a conflict of interest.At his second trial in 2001, a woman eventually chosen as a juror lied during jury selection and failed to disclose domestic violence, messy divorces and a child custody battle that were "bizarrely similar" to Sallie's case, his lawyers said. They add she later bragged to his attorneys' investigator that she persuaded her divided peers to vote unanimously for death.The defense team made those arguments in a clemency petition to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, urging it to act as a "fail safe" against a miscarriage of justice. But the board, the only authority in Georgia with power to commute a death sentence, declined to spare Sallie's life following a clemency hearing Monday.Sallie's lawyers are also asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the scheduled execution.
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