Judge rules Neelley not eligible for parole until 2014

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA - A Montgomery, Alabama judge has ruled that former death row inmate Judith Ann Neelley must remain in prison for another 12 years before she can be considered for parole. <br> <br> Neelley, a former high school cheerleader sentenced to death for the murder of a 13-year-old Georgia girl, was saved from the electric chair when former Governor Fob James commuted her death sentence several days before he left office in 1999. <br> <br> Neelley&#39;s attorney, Barry Ragsdale, had argued that she should be immediately eligible for parole consideration because she has already served more than 19 years in prison. But Reese ruled Monday that state law requires that a person must serve at least 15 years in prison after a death sentence is commuted. <br> <br> Ragsdale had argued that the intent of the Legislature when it passed the 1951 law was to include time a prisoner had already served. Reese said that if the Legislature had intended to give credit for time served before a commutation, it could have done so. <br> <br> The Murfreesboro, Tennessee, native was convicted on capital murder charges in the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Lisa Ann Millican. The teenager was abducted from a Rome, Georgia, shopping center and sexually abused before Neelley injected her six times with liquid drain cleaner, fatally shot her and dumped her body in Little River Canyon near Fort Payne, Alabama. <br> <br> The killing came during a crime spree in which Neelley and her then husband, Alvin Neelley, also kidnapped and murdered 22-year-old Janice Kay Chatman of Rome, Georgia. Alvin Neelley is serving a life sentence in Georgia for Chatman&#39;s death.

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