Lawyers seek to delay Georgia execution set for next week

ATLANTA — Lawyers for a Georgia man scheduled to be put to death next week for killing an 8-year-old girl 46 years ago are trying to delay the execution. The lawsuit says the agreement said that, with one named exception, executions wouldn’t resume until six months after three conditions had been met: the expiration of the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency, the resumption of normal visitation at state prisons and the availability of a COVID vaccine “to all members of the public.” The judicial emergency ended in June, but prisons are still using a modified visitation policy and children under 5 still can’t access the vaccine, according to the lawsuit which names Carr and the state of Georgia as defendants. The agreement said that once the conditions were met, the state intended to seek an execution date for Billy Raulerson, who was sentenced to death for the May 1993 killings of three people in south Georgia, and that Raulerson’s lawyers would be given at least three months notice after the conditions were met, the lawsuit says. A few days later, on April 25, the state attorney notified Presnell’s lawyers that the state intended to seek an execution warrant for him, the lawsuit says. Contrary to the agreement, the attorney general gave Presnell’s attorneys just two days of notice that they intended to set his execution date, the lawsuit says.