The execution of Kelly Renee Gissendaner, the only woman on Georgia’s death row, proceeded past midnight on Wednesday, September 30, 2015, after her final statement echoed through the execution chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. She became the first woman put to death by the state in 70 years.
Gissendaner, 47, was pronounced dead at 12:21 a. m. following a lethal injection.
Witnesses reported that she cried, trembled, and sang “Amazing Grace” as the drugs entered her veins. Her voice slowed and then stopped. The execution was delayed several hours by last-minute legal appeals.
“I just want my kids to know that love still beats out hate,” Gissendaner said in a statement released by the Georgia Department of Corrections shortly after 5 p. m. Tuesday.
“I want the Gissendaner family to know that I’m sorry. Because of me, a good man lost his life.”
Her final meal included cheese dip with chips, Texas toast, cornbread, buttermilk pie, and a Sprite. She ate slowly and left some of the food untouched, according to prison officials.
Gissendaner’s execution stemmed from the brutal murder of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner, in February 1997. She orchestrated the killing with her lover, Gregory Owen, who stabbed and beat Douglas to death in a remote wooded area in Gwinnett County. Owen accepted a plea deal for life without parole and testified against her.
Despite a flurry of last-minute appeals, pleas from her children, and a personal clemency request from Pope Francis, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to commute her sentence. More than 60,000 people signed petitions urging mercy.
Gissendaner spent 18 years on death row in an isolated unit, the only woman facing execution in Georgia during that time. She transformed behind bars, earning a theology degree and ministering to other inmates. But the courts upheld her conviction and sentence.
“Tell my children I love them,” she said as she lay strapped to the gurney. “Tell the Gissendaner family I’m so sorry. I went out singing ‘Amazing Grace.’”
Her voice remained clear despite tears. At 12:29 a. m.
, she was pronounced dead.
The victim’s family expressed relief. “She thought she could outsmart all of us,” said Douglas’s sister. “But not today.
Not ever.”
This execution marks a rare event in Georgia’s history. The last woman executed in the state was in 1945. Gissendaner’s case drew national attention due to her gender, her demonstrated remorse, and the question of whether an accomplice who did not physically commit the murder should face the death penalty.
Douglas Gissendaner, a mechanic, had raised Kelly’s three children from previous relationships. She and he had married, divorced, and remarried. Prosecutors showed that Kelly took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Douglas without his knowledge and forged his signature.
Gregory Owen, the actual killer, will spend life in prison. He testified that Kelly planned the murder for weeks, handed him a steel bat and a hunting knife, and instructed him to stage a robbery. She was out drinking with a friend while the murder took place.
As the lethal drugs flowed, Kelly softly sang the hymn she had practiced with the prison chaplain. The song echoed through the chamber as she took shallow breaths between verses. Then silence.
Lawyers for Gissendaner argued that she had changed profoundly and should be spared. “She was strong, she was assured, she handled herself with poise beyond belief,” her attorney said after the execution. But the state saw no legal or moral reason to intervene.
She is survived by her three children, who had begged the parole board to allow their mother to live. “She is all that we have left,” one of her sons said.
The execution concludes a case that the Georgia Supreme Court described as a cold, calculated murder for financial gain. The law, the court said, does not distinguish between the mastermind and the hand that wields the knife.
