Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles will consider a request to spare the life of convicted murderer and rapist Virgil Delano Presnell Jr. the day before his scheduled execution next week.
Last month, Cobb Superior Court ordered that Presnell, who had already been sentenced to death by a jury, be executed sometime between May 17 and May 24; Department of Corrections Commissioner Timothy Ward chose 7 p.m. May 17.
Presnell was convicted in the 1976 kidnapping and murder of an eight-year-old girl and the kidnapping and rape of a 10-year-old girl. Initially sentenced to death in 1976, the Supreme Court overturned Presnell’s sentence on a technicality. In 1999, then-Cobb DA Pat Head successfully re-sought the death penalty, and Presnell has sat on death row ever since.
“In Georgia, the Parole Board has the sole constitutional authority to grant clemency and commute or reduce a death sentence to life with the possibility of parole or to life without the possibility of parole,” Steve Hayes, the parole board’s director of communications, said in a news release.
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