Last Thursday's execution of Scotty Morrow leaves one convicted Hall County murderer on Georgia's death row.
As late as 2005, there were three. But, in March of that year, Stephen Anthony Mobley was put to death for the robbery-murder of Oakwood pizza story manager John Collins. Now, David Scott Franks is the only Hall County death row inmate.
Franks was convicted in 1998 of killing a Gainesville woman, Deborah Wilson, in 1994 in a two-day crime spree that also left her husband and another man dead in west Georgia.
Mobley, by the way, was the first Hall County killer to be put to death in nearly 70 years. State Department of Corrections records show that 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 carrying 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.
As of January 1, 2019, there were 50 people, all men, on Georgia's death row, according to the Department of Corrections' Annual Roster of Death Row Inmates. In addition to Franks, there are three other inmates from northeast Georgia awaiting execution. They are from Elbert, Jackson, and Gwinnett counties.
(Editor's note: Portions of this story first appeared on AccessWDUN in 2005 just before Mobley's execution.)
