“You let my kids know I went out singing Amazing Grace.” These were a few of Kelly Gissendaner’s last words before she was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 30, 2015. Her death makes her the first woman in Georgia to be executed in 70 years.
Gissendaner was convicted of murder in 1997 for persuading her lover to kill her husband, Doug Gissendaner. The man who killed Gissendaner’s husband, Greg Owen, was sent to spend his life in jail, but Kelly Gissendaner was sent to death.
The decision to execute Gissendaner wasn’t taken lightly. Her legal team filed three appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, even one from her children the day of Gissendaner’s execution, but all were denied. The Pope tried his best to stop the execution from occurring as well. While waiting for a final decision from the parole board, he sent a letter in attempt to persuade them to spare Gissendaner’s life.
"While not wishing to minimize the gravity of the crime for which Ms. Gissendaner has been convicted, and while sympathizing with the victims, I nonetheless implore you, in consideration of the reasons that have been presented to your Board, to commute the sentence to one that would better express both justice and mercy,” he wrote.
Although Kelly and Doug’s two children were mortified at their mother’s role in the death of their father, they pled to authorities to show mercy, saying that their mother has changed tremendously in her past 18 years on death row. "My dad would not want my mom to be executed, even knowing her role in his murder," Kayla Gissendaner said in a statement. "He would not want us to endure another devastating loss."
While Gissendaner didn’t receive mercy from the courts, she ended her life with words full of remorse and love. “Tell the Gissendaner family I am so sorry. That amazing man lost his life because of me and if I could take it back, if this would change it, I would have done it a long time ago. But it’s not. And I just hope they find peace. And I hope they find happiness. God bless you,” Gissendaner said before she was executed.
While Gissendaner’s actions are undoubtedly immoral and unjustified, her execution is heating up the debate on the death penalty. Some are outraged at Gissendaner’s sentence compared to Owen’s, who testified against Gissendaner as part of a plea deal that gave him life in prison instead of death. More than 90,000 people signed a petition calling for Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal to halt the execution, claiming that Gissendaner has turned her life around for the better. Others, however, question the mercy and sympathy being given toward Kelly Gissendaner and not Greg Gissendaner’s family.
While the death penalty has been established as constitutional by the Supreme Court on several occasions, there are still critics around the country who are against such a final punishment. Gissendaner’s death is sure to spark a conversation on the death penalty and whether it is appropriate to use, even in cases when the person on death row is the person who committed the murder.
