Clemency denied; Georgia to execute its first female prisoner in 70 years

Kelly Renee Gissendaner, 47, was convicted in a February 1997 murder plot that targeted her husband in suburban Atlanta.

Gissendaner was romantically involved with Gregory Owen and conspired with the 43-year-old to have her husband, Douglas Gissendaner, killed, according to court testimony. Owen wanted Kelly Gissendaner to file for a divorce, but she was concerned that her husband would “not leave her alone if she simply divorced him,” court documents said.

The Gissendaners had already divorced once, in 1993, and they remarried in 1995.

A nightstick and a hunting knife

Details of the crime, as laid out at trial and provided by Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, are as follows:

The first was Baker, an African-American maid who was sentenced to death by an all-white, all-male jury in 1944. She claimed self-defense for killing a man who held her against her will, threatened her life and appeared poised to hit her with a metal bar before she fired the fatal shot.

Sixty year after her execution, Georgia’s parole board posthumously pardoned her after finding that “it was a grievous error to deny (her) clemency.”

Such pardons are rare, but so are executions of women.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, only 15 women have been executed in the United States since 1977.

CNN’s Greg Botelho contributed to this report.

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