Georgia executed a man convicted of stealing a car from an off-duty prison guard he met at a Wal-Mart in 1996 and murdering him with a blast to the head from a sawn-off shotgun, a state official said.
Robert Butts Jr., 40, was put to death by lethal injection on Friday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson. He became the 10th inmate put to death this year in the United States.
Lawyers for the death row inmate had asked the state clemency board to spare his life and sentence him to life in prison. They said the accomplice was the trigger man and that the tainted testimony of jail house informants, who said Butts told them he pulled the trigger, was used in his trial.
“Robert Butts did not shoot and kill Donovan Parks,” they wrote.
Two of three cell mates have admitted to lying when they testified in court that Butts confessed to the killing, the clemency petition said.
