Condemned child killer should be spared from execution, attorney says

Presnell kidnapped two Cobb County girls as they walked home from Russell Elementary School in May 1976, raping a 10-year-old and then drowning her 8-year-old friend in a nearby creek when she tried to run. He was sentenced to death later that year, and again in 1999 after his first sentence was overturned.

In a clemency request submitted to the parole board, Presnell’s attorney Monet Brewerton-Palmer asked that his scheduled execution be delayed three months and ultimately commuted to life without parole.

The 51-page filing suggests Presnell has severe brain damage stemming from his mother’s heavy drinking while she was pregnant. Sexual abuse was “endemic” in Presnell’s family, his lawyer said, and he was raised in an abusive and unstable environment.

It also details his nearly five decades on death row, during which he was routinely raped and beaten at two state prisons.

“People can and will debate whether Mr. Presnell has served enough time, but nobody can dispute that he has served hard time,” Brewerton-Palmer wrote. “His crime was the worst of the worst — and so has his sentence been.”

Presnell, she said, is “deeply and profoundly sorry” for the pain he caused his victims and their families and wishes he could “take it all back.”

The abduction and murder of 8-year-old Lori Ann Smith stunned the South Cobb community, said former U.S. Rep. Buddy Darden, who was Cobb’s district attorney at the time. He remembers the May 4, 1976, killing occurred the day then-Gov. Jimmy Carter won the state’s Democratic presidential nomination.

While many argue the merits of capital punishment, Darden said so long as the death penalty remains an option in Georgia, he believes Presnell is deserving of it.

“This was an egregious case and there was never any real doubt about the evidence,” Darden said, noting that life without parole was not an option during Presnell’s initial sentencing.

“If any case ever merited the death penalty, this was certainly one,” he said. “Looking back on it, the circumstances were so horrible and so heinous.”

Several of the victims’ former classmates have discussed the case on social media recently and how it affected their upbringing.

Cobb resident Tracy Taylor, who was a year older than Smith, remembers how shocked and sad they were after learning of the attack.

Prior to the 8-year-old’s murder, she and her friends were allowed to ride their bikes wherever they wanted as long as they were back by dark. Afterward, they were told by their parents not to stray too far from home.

“One day we could play outside with our friends without a care in the world,” Taylor said Saturday. “The next we couldn’t do that any more.”

In spite of the abuse he endured during his 46 years on death row, Presnell has a “spotless disciplinary history and has been a model prisoner,” his attorney argued.

He was 22 when he was convicted, but now he is a “quiet, simple old man with a developmental disability who adores his son and his sister,” Brewerton-Palmer said.

“Executing him after all this time would serve no purpose, and would bring more pain to more innocent people,” she wrote in the clemency request. “It would also be wholly contrary to the ideals of a civilized society to execute someone so profoundly disabled.”

A separate hearing was underway Monday afternoon in Fulton County Superior Court, where attorneys representing the Federal Defender Program filed a lawsuit against the state and Attorney General Chris Carr. The lawsuit contends the decision to execute Presnell violates last year’s agreement with the AG’s office postponing most executions until after the COVID-19 pandemic.

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