Georgia Supreme Court denies stay of execution for condemned Baldwin County killer

Convicted Baldwin County killer Joshua Daniel Bishop, who as a boy lived at a Macon youth home, was denied clemency Thursday morning.

Hours later, the Georgia Supreme Court denied a stay of execution in the case by a 6-1 vote. Bishop is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson. The execution order runs until April 7, should appeals delay the execution.

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Bishop was 19 in June 1994 when, after a night of cocaine use and heavy drinking at the Hill Top Grill, he beat and murdered 43-year-old carpenter Leverette Lewis Morrison with a wooden closet rod at a nearby mobile home on Linton Road, east of Milledgeville.

Bishop also admitted having a hand in killing another man in the days before Morrison was slain.

Bishop was convicted in February 1996 of Morrison's slaying and sentenced to die.

His current lawyers, in asking for the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency, described Bishop's "dismal" and chaotic childhood, one in which he spent formative years "on the streets" and in foster homes.

He also lived for a time in the late 1980s at the Methodist Children's Home in Macon. While staying there, he attended Tinsley Elementary School and made the honor roll.

His attorneys cited the wishes of some relatives of Bishop's victims who asked that Bishop's sentence be commuted to life in prison. Three of Morrison's children, however, spoke out at Wednesday's clemency hearing in favor of death for Bishop.

Bishop's attorneys said seven of the 12 jurors who sentenced Bishop to death now favor a life-without-parole sentence.

The lawyers, who include attorney Sarah Gerwig-Moore of Macon, contended that Bishop was influenced by an older accomplice, Mark Braxley, then 36, who also was convicted in the slaying but sentenced to life with the chance of parole.

It had been Braxley's idea to pluck the keys to Morrison's car from Morrison's pocket as he slept, the lawyers said, and steal the older man's 1994 Jeep Wagoneer. But Morrison woke up, and Bishop and Braxley beat him to death.

They wrapped Morrison's body in a bedsheet, dumped it near a trash bin, drove to a nearby pond and set the Jeep on fire.

Bishop later, in police custody, also confessed to his role in the slaying of Ricky Willis a couple of weeks earlier. Bishop was never tried for that killing, though details of the crime were presented at Bishop's sentencing in the Morrison case.

Bishop told authorities that Willis was killed after Willis bragged about sexually assaulting Bishop's mother. Bishop said he punched Willis repeatedly and that Braxley, his accomplice in the Morrison slaying, fatally slit Willis' throat with a fishing-tackle knife.

Bishop and Braxley then buried Willis' body.

Bishop's attorneys, in seeking clemency for him, said many of Willis' kin favored clemency.

Support for Bishop also came from Morrison's relatives.

Morrison's brother and Morrison's wife at the time he was slain also made known their desires for Bishop's clemency.

A letter from one of Morrison's younger sisters, Janet Warren, said Morrison more or less raised her as a child. Even so, she pleaded "for the life of Joshua Daniel Bishop" and described Bishop at the time of the slaying as "a 19-year-old with no life."

"I believe that Joshua can been a bless'n to other in prison," Warren wrote. "I feel his life has purpose. ... Please let this man live!!!"

Another one of the slain man's sisters asked that Bishop's life be spared and mentioned that Morrison's now-deceased mother hadn't wanted Bishop put to death "because he was somebody's child."

Bishop's attorneys said he grew up amid a backdrop of abandonment and abuse at the hands of a drug-addicted, alcoholic mother who reportedly "often made Josh sleep under their trailer in rural Milledgeville."

For a time as a boy he lived beneath a midstate bridge.

A law enforcement official who found him there once referred to the locale as a "terrible, dirty and dangerous place" but one Bishop didn't want to leave because, without him, his mother would have been left there alone.

Contact writer Joe Kovac Jr. at 744-4397 and find him on Twitter@joekovacjr.

This story was originally published March 31, 2016 at 5:13 PM with the headline "Georgia Supreme Court denies stay of execution for condemned Baldwin County killer ."