Arkansas inmate Jack Gordon Greene is set to be executed November 9 after Governor Asa Hutchinson followed through on a request to set the date by state attorney general Leslie Rutledge on Friday.
According to information from Rutledge’s office, Greene has exhausted all “appeals, collateral review of the conviction and sentence in the state courts, habeas corpus proceedings in federal court” in the murder of 69-year-old Sidney Jethro Burnett of Knoxville on July 23, 1991.
Sidney, a retired preacher, was beaten, tied up, tortured, stabbed and shot.Greene, who was already wanted for the murder of his brother out of North Carolina at the time, invaded Burnett’s Johnson County home, committed the murder then stole Burnett’s truck and fled to Oklahoma.
Greene was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in the Johnson County Circuit Court on October 15, 1993. The Arkansas Supreme Court remanded the Johnson County Circut Court for resentencing multiple times, however, each time Greene was sentenced to death.
The sentence was officially upheld on appeal in July of 1999.
On Dec. 2, 1999 the Arkansas Supreme Court to review all death penalty cases, regardless of whether defendants waive their rights to appeal.
Green had been scheduled to die the week that review was announced.
In January of 2002, Greene filed a petition for post-conviction relief that was denied. In 2004 Greene filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus, attacking the constitutionality of his capital murder conviction but again, he was denied.
Rutledge said since there is no stay of execution in place regarding Green’s conviction, sentence, or current lethal-injection protocol, she is requesting an execution date be set by the governor.
The August 4 delivery to the state of a fresh batch of Midazolam, the execution drug that was the focus which was the focus of nationwide attention during a series of executions conducted in late April/early May of this year.
Greene, who is incarcerated at the Varner Supermax facility in Gould, recently turned 72 years old.
Greene and his girlfriend lived in Springdale from 1984 until 1991 when she took their daughter and left him. Greene returned to North Carolina and killed his brother Tommy with the same gun he later used in the murder of Burnett.
He also kidnapped a niece at the same time oh his brother’s death, but she survived the ordeal.
Burnett and his wife had befriended the girlfriend and daughter after the girlfriend left Greene in 1991. He vowed to kill both Burnett’s upon his return to Arkansas, but Mrs. Burnett was not home the day of the slaying.
Assistant Federal Defender Scott Braden says Greene has severe mental illness and issued the following statement in response to the execution date being set:
“The State has taken the next step toward executing a man who suffers from severe mental illness. Mr. Greene has long held a fixed delusion that the Arkansas Department of Correction is conspiring with his attorneys to cover up injuries that he believes corrections officers have inflicted upon him. He complains that his spinal cord has been removed and his central nervous system has been destroyed. He believes he will be executed to cover up what he calls these ‘crimes against humanity.’
“In the coming weeks, it’s imperative that the appropriate decision makers consider whether the State should execute a man in such a feeble mental state. The U.S. Supreme Court has been clear that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of someone who cannot rationally comprehend his execution. Two-and-a-half decades of solitary confinement—piled on top of Mr. Greene’s existing mental fragility—call the legality of Mr. Greene’s execution into serious doubt.”
