A GA jury was split on whether to sentence Donnie Rowe to death. Why that matters
Convicted killer Donnie Russell “Whiskey” Rowe Jr. sat silent Wednesday in the minutes before he was sentenced. Across the courtroom, the daughters and a wife and two sisters of the men he murdered took the witness stand and told of the heartbreak and destruction Rowe had caused.
One of his victim’s children, in an impassioned and unmerciful speech, glared at Rowe and said, “I hate you!”
Rowe, who will spend life in prison with no chance of parole for killing two Georgia correctional officers during a 2017 prison bus escape on a highway near Eatonton, had moments earlier learned that jurors deadlocked on whether to sentence him to death.
Thursday, one of his defense attorneys, Franklin J. Hogue of Macon, said Rowe had all along known that he would be convicted of the killings, which he was last week. What Rowe had not known was whether he would spend the rest of his days on death row, awaiting execution, or be sentenced to life in prison.
Hogue said that Rowe, 48, felt “a tremendous relief” when his life-without-parole sentence was read.
“He is remorseful ... but it doesn’t count for much,” Hogue said, adding that Rowe knows what he did “was horrible.”
Rowe will now be housed in the isolated, ultra-restrictive confines of the Special Management Unit at the state prison near Interstate 75 west of Jackson. He may well never leave that prison’s grounds. And he almost certainly will never be transported on a prison bus the way he was the morning of June 13, 2017, when, according to prosecutors, he and another inmate killed the two correctional officers on board and went on a three-day crime spree before they were captured in middle Tennessee.
Jurors split
Jurors who decided Rowe’s fate after nine days of testimony in his Putnam County murder trial and its subsequent sentencing phase were, after nearly eight hours of deliberation that spanned two days, split 6-5-1.
It was unclear whether the majority favored or opposed sentencing Rowe to die. A unanimous 12-0 verdict is required to impose a death sentence.
Hogue said prosecutors “couldn’t have put on a better case” in seeking to have Rowe die for his crimes. Hogue said if ever there were a case in which the state could have pursued capital punishment, this was one that fit the bill: two correctional officers gunned down in the line of duty.
Hogue didn’t so much credit Rowe’s defense team or “super lawyering” for sparing Rowe a sentence of death by lethal injection. Rather Hogue, an ardent death penalty foe, suggested that jurors today may be less inclined to see killers executed. He wondered if “what we’re witnessing is the dying gasps of the death penalty.”
A June report from the Pew Research Center said support for capital punishment has “declined substantially” during the past few decades. Even so, the report noted, “60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it.”
Sheriff worries about verdict’s message
Putnam Sheriff Howard Sills, who oversaw the investigation into the bus escape, the killings and the capture of Rowe and his alleged accomplice, Ricky Dubose, said that while he respects the jury’s verdict he worries about the message it sends.
Rowe had already been serving life without parole for committing his criminal “third strike” in a robbery at a Macon motel as he was passing through on a trip to visit his sister in south Georgia at Halloween in 2001.
Sills recounted the crimes Rowe was convicted of in recent days: murdering the officers on the bus; stealing at gunpoint the car of a man who’d stopped behind the bus on the highway; stealing a truck and cars on a three-day crime spree into Tennessee; terrorizing a couple there at a farmhouse, hog-tying them in a home invasion; and then leading a police chase down a freeway, “driving like Dale Earnhardt,” while Dubose allegedly fired shots at pursuing cops.
“And what did Donnie Rowe get for doing all that?” Sills asked Thursday. “The answer is nothing.”
Added Sills: “What is that saying to law enforcement? ... He received no punishment.”
He said police forces across the country are struggling to hire people as it is.
“This,” he said, “is just another nail in our coffin.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 10:31 AM.