Judge sentences man convicted of killing two Georgia guards during prison bus escape
A man convicted of killing two Georgia Department of Corrections officers during a brazen and bloody escape from a prison transport bus four years ago was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison without parole.
Donnie Russell “Whiskey” Rowe Jr. had faced a possible death sentence, but jurors could not reach the required unanimous verdict to send him to death row.
The jury of seven women and five men brought to Putnam County from Grady County in south Georgia because of pretrial publicity deliberated for about eight hours over two days.
The jurors convened for nearly three hours Tuesday evening before retiring to the motel where they have been sequestered. Half an hour or so before leaving the courthouse Tuesday, the jurors sent a note to the judge asking what would happen if they could not agree on how to sentence Rowe. They also asked if sentencing Rowe to life in a “supermax” prison was an option. The judge answered both inquires with a note saying the jurors had been given all the information or instruction they could receive.
Late last week in Putnam Superior Court, the same jurors convicted Rowe, 48, of murdering correctional Sgts. Curtis Billue and Christopher Monica. The murders happened in a violent escape aboard a bus ferrying 33 inmates from a prison near Milledgeville to a lockup outside Jackson. The attack happened along Ga. Highway 16 as the bus cruised south of Lake Oconee about 10 miles east of Eatonton on the morning of June 13, 2017.
Billue, the bus driver, and Monica, the watchman on board, were shot to death, prosecutors have said, by Rowe’s accomplice, Ricky Dubose, who is expected to be tried later. After Rowe jimmied a lock on a gate separating the officers from the inmates, he burst into the bus’s driver’s compartment and struck Monica with the handcuff chains Rowe had shimmied out of.
Dubose allegedly followed Rowe into the compartment and in a matter of seconds grabbed one officer’s pistol from a box and shot both men three times, killing them. Rowe and Dubose then went on a three-day run from the law that ended in Rowe’s native middle Tennessee, prosecutors have said. The remaining inmates on the bus, not directly involved in the breakout, stayed put.
Officials have said that a series of errors made by the officers, who hadn’t properly locked the bus’s security gate or correctly handcuffed the inmates, contributed to the escape.
Jurors deliberate on sentencing
Testimony in Rowe’s trial began Sept. 20.
Jurors in the sentencing phase on Wednesday deliberated for about five additional hours, and after nine days of hearing evidence and, after finding Rowe guilty of murder last Thursday, failed to reach a unanimous decision.
In closing argument during the penalty phase of the trial on Tuesday afternoon, Putnam District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale III said that Rowe, who did not testify, was not sorry for his crimes.
Barksdale reminded jurors that Rowe was already serving a life-without-parole sentence for a 2001 robbery at a Macon motel.
Barksdale said that even if Rowe were sentenced to remain behind bars for life, he “will continue a wave of crime. ... He won’t quit.”
The prosecutor called Rowe “a calculated killer,” a man for whom “nothing is off-limits,” whose “crimes have only escalated” since he was first arrested for stealing a ring at age 13.
‘As much mercy as he gave’
Rowe’s defense team had earlier on Tuesday suggested that if sentenced to life in prison — locked away in the state’s most secure penitentiary, the Special Management Unit at the prison near Jackson — Rowe would no longer be a threat. They had also stressed earlier in the trial that Rowe was not the man who fired the deadly gunshots.
“He will be in the custody of human beings, who all make mistakes,” Barksdale said, gesturing to Rowe at the defense table, saying that if not sentenced to die, Rowe will “be lurking ... waiting to strike like the rattlesnake that he is.”
The district attorney urged jurors to “show the defendant as much mercy as he gave.”
He mentioned that if the jury spared Rowe’s life and sentenced him to remain behind bars for the rest of his days that the killings of the guards and the crime spree that followed Rowe’s prison break was, in essence, on the house. “All of that’s free,” Barksdale said.
Then the prosecutor unfurled the officers’ blood-stained uniform shirts. He held one in each hand, up high, his arms stretched wide, and then placed the garments on a wooden railing at the front of the jury box.
“They’re never coming back,” Barksdale said of the fallen officers.
Then he asked the jury to sentence Rowe to death, to deliberate and come out “with your head held high ... knowing that your message is heard.”
Rowe’s lawyers on Tuesday before their closing remarks called to the witness stand a cousin of Rowe’s. She testified about the abusive childhood Rowe endured at the hands of a stepfather prone to drunken rages and a hateful mother who left Rowe to fend for himself at age 13.
The cousin, Patricia Kinsey, a nurse in south Georgia, said Rowe endured “chaos every day ... no stability.” She told of the stepfather kicking Rowe with steel-toed work boots when Rowe was a child, and once beating Rowe unconscious in a barn with a piece of lumber.
Asked why she had come to testify knowing of her cousin’s crimes, Kinsey said, “I love him and I don’t want him to die. ... Forgiveness has to come into play.”
Barksdale, the prosecutor, later acknowledged Rowe’s childhood horrors. “I hate that,” he said, but noted that other relatives who grew up in the same conditions Rowe had did not grow up to be killers.
“None of them,” Barksdale said, “went around shooting people.”
‘Long trail of pain and anguish’
In his final remarks to the jury, Rowe’s lead attorney, Franklin J. Hogue of Macon, said there was no denying “the long trail of pain and anguish that Donnie Rowe left in his wake.”
Still, Hogue encouraged jurors to grant Rowe mercy, reminding them of Rowe’s oft-brutal upbringing. Hogue, recalling the Sunday testimony of another Rowe cousin, said that when Rowe was a boy his mother at dinner once informed her children they were eating Rowe’s pet rabbit, which she had cooked.
Hogue said Rowe grew up “saddled with the deficits.”
Rowe, he said, was shown “no love, or very little of it,” and that Rowe never found his “off-ramp off that dark highway” the way some of his siblings and cousins had.
“You,” Hogue told the jury, “can extend mercy.”
“Look within your heart,” he went on, asking the jurors to say to themselves, “I choose life. I choose to let him live. ... I ask you on behalf a Donnie Rowe. Do not kill him.”
Before Judge Brenda H. Trammell sentenced Rowe to life behind bars, relatives of the slain officers addressed the court.
Billue’s sister, Denise Billue, called Rowe and Dubose “heartless murderers.” She said her brother had been lauded at his funeral as one of the best correctional officers in the state.
“Yet you took his life!” she said.
Monica’s widow, Denise Monica, spoke next and said to Rowe, “You destroyed our lives!”
She said her husband had been hard-working, “loving, kind,” and as she spoke through tears on the witness stand, she said to Rowe, “I know the devil exists because you exist.”
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 3:22 PM.