Three from Hall on death row

ATLANTA - Stephen Anthony Mobley, who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, is not the only Hall County killer on Georgia's death row.

There are two others also awaiting exeuction.

David Scott Franks was convicted in 1998 of killing a Gainesville woman in a two-day crime spree that also left her husband and another man dead in west Georgia.

Scotty Morrow is also on death row - convicted five years ago of the murders of his girlfriend and another woman.

Also, among the 123 people on Georgia's death row is Timothy Woodrow Pruitt who was convicted of murder in Lumpkin County in 1996.

Mobley came within two-and-a-half hours of being put to death by lethal injection in August 2002 for the 1991 robbery-murder of an Oakwood pizza store manager. The two judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who issued the stay did not give a reason and the stay remained in effect until a couple of weeks ago when a new death warrant was signed by a Hall County Superior Court judge.

If Mobley is executed Tuesday, he will be the first Hall County killer to be put to death in nearly 70 years.

John Daniel and Demps Charles were electrocuted on the same day, Aug. 21 1936, for murder.

Others - besides Mobley, Morrow and Franks - have been sentenced to death since then, but for one reason or another they are no longer on death row.

Georgia switched from the electric chair to lethal injection in 2000. The electric chair had been in use since 1924 when the state switched from hanging, which had been used since 1735, as the means of carryiing out executions.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1964 suspended all executions in Georgia and elsewhere in the country. A new Georgia death sentence law was passed in 1973 and executions resumed in the state in 1976.