As reported in this local article, "Georgia has executed Donnie Lance for the 1997 murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend in Jackson County." Here are some more details about the crime and prelude to the second execution completed in the United States in the year 2020:
Lance, 65, who was sentenced to death in 1999, was given a lethal injection of pentobarbital at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. He declined to make a final statement, to hear a final prayer. He’d already spent the day praying with family, including his adult kids, who had tried to stop the state from executing for the deaths of their mother, Joy Lance, 39, and her boyfriend, Dwight “Butch” Wood Jr., 33....
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Lance’s final appeals at roughly 8:15 p.m., clearing the way for his execution. The high court, in two separate orders, declined to hear Lance’s requests that it halt his execution on grounds of alleged prosecution misconduct and lower-court rulings that denied his request for DNA testing....
Lance’s attorneys have also argued that the jury that convicted him and sentenced him to death should have known he had brain damage and an IQ that makes him borderline intellectually disabled. Lance has maintained his innocence, and his grown children have spent months unsuccessfully calling for DNA testing on case evidence to confirm whether he killed their mother....
In January 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Lance’s appeal, which included information about his trial attorney’s failure to submit any mitigating evidence in the sentencing phase of the trial. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying Lance’s lawyer should have presented evidence of his client’s cognitive impairments. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan joined in the dissent.Sotomayor said multiple experts had testified in a previous hearing that Lance, a former race car driver, had frontal lobe damage. (The frontal lobe of the brain controls myriad cognitive processes, including memory, reasoning and language.) Sotomayor said the experts also agreed that Lance’s IQ was borderline for intellectual disability.... Tammy Dearing [Wood’s sister] said she sympathizes with the Lance children, but their father made his bed. “We as taxpayers have supported this man for too long,” she said. “There’s so many things we missed out on as a family. I watched Butch’s kids grow up without a dad.”
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