On
this date, June 20, 2019, Marion Wilson was executed by lethal injection in
Georgia, USA. He made history as the 1,500 executed in the USA since 1976. He
was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of corrections officer Donovan Corey
Parks on March 28, 1996.
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FILE - This undated file
photo provided by The Georgia Department of Corrections shows Marion Wilson Jr.
Wilson, convicted of killing an off-duty prison guard in Georgia more than two
decades earlier. The state parole board has delayed making a decision in a
clemency hearing for Wilson, who is scheduled to receive a lethal injection
Thursday, June 20, 2019.
Photo: Georgia
Department of Corrections via AP, File
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Marion Wilson
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Born
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July 29, 1976
Brunswick, Georgia, U.S.
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Died
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June 20, 2019 (aged 42)
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Criminal status
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Executed by lethal
injection on June 20, 2019
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Criminal charge
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Murder
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Penalty
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Death penalty (November 7, 1997)
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Details
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Victims
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Donovan Corey Parks, 24
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Date
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March 28, 1996
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Country
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State(s)
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Marion "Murdock" Wilson
Jr. (July 29, 1976 – June 20, 2019) was an American
prisoner executed by the state of Georgia for murder. He was the 1500th person
to be executed in the United States since capital punishment was
resumed in 1976. He was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of corrections
officer Donovan Corey Parks.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Wilson_(prisoner)
Murder
On
March 28, 1996, Wilson and his accomplice Robert Earl Butts Jr. (May 14, 1977 –
May 4, 2018)
came across off-duty prison guard Donovan Corey Parks, outside a Walmart in Milledgeville, Georgia. Butts had worked
with Parks at a local Burger King and asked if they could get a ride in his
car. Parks agreed and took the two men in his car. Butts was sitting in the
front passenger seat of the vehicle and Wilson was sitting in the back as they
left the parking lot.
Parks
was then fatally shot by one of the two men with a sawn-off
shotgun. He was ordered out of his car and shot in the back of his head as
he lay on the ground. His dead body was found lying face down on a residential
street not far from the parking lot. Butts and Wilson fled in the stolen car,
which they later burned after being unsuccessful in their attempt at finding
someone to sell it to.
Trial and execution
Butts
and Wilson were arrested four days after the murder and each man accused the
other of pulling the trigger. They were both gang members in the Folk
Nation street gang. Prosecutors claim they murdered Parks to achieve a
higher status within their gang. Both men were convicted of murder and
sentenced to death in 1997.
Butts
was executed by lethal injection on May 4, 2018
at the Georgia Diagnostic
and Classification State Prison.
The
Georgia State Board of Pardons
and Paroles denied clemency for Wilson. He requested a last meal
of one medium thin-crust pizza with everything, 20 buffalo wings, one pint of
butter pecan ice cream, some apple pie and grape juice. Wilson was executed by
lethal injection on June 20, 2019.
He became the 1500th person to be executed in the United States since capital
punishment was resumed in 1976 after Gregg
v. Georgia. His execution was carried out at 9:52 p.m. ET at the Georgia Diagnostic and
Classification Prison in Jackson,
Georgia after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution.
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In this June 14, 2019
photo, Chris Parks poses with a portrait of his brother Donovan Corey Parks in
Powder Springs, Ga. (AP Photo/Andrea Smith)
Photo: Copyright 2019
The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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After
execution, victim’s brother hopes to finally find peace
Continuing
Coverage: Death Penalty
By Joshua
Sharpe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
JACKSON – Christopher Parks came here to watch a
man die.
He sat on a pew Thursday night in the small death
house at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. He watched as state
workers gave Marion Wilson, 42, a fatal dose of pentobarbital. The inmate was
on a gurney, IV lines releasing the drug into his veins, slowing his
breath.
The execution was punishment for the 1996 murder of
Parks’ brother. Donovan Parks, 24, was an off-duty corrections officer in
Milledgeville, studying to become an inmate counselor, when a sawed-off shotgun
blast to his head ended it all.
A
flurry of last-minute appeals couldn’t save Wilson.
As
death drew near, his 23-year-old daughter, Tykecia, was huddled outside with a
group of anti-death penalty protesters. She began screaming, “I want my daddy,
I want my daddy back!” A man picked her up and carried her away as she wailed
and wailed.
In the death house, Wilson released his final words.
“I
ain’t never took a life in my life,” he said, suggesting his co-defendant had
pulled the trigger, according to the Associated Press.
Wilson’s
words, of course, meant basically nothing to Christopher Parks.
Parks,
who was 18 in 1996 and now works in cyber security for the U.S. government,
came here not caring what Wilson had to say. He came here, he said, because
seeing Wilson dead was the best chance for him and his family to begin
recovering after 23 years without Donovan.
Death
penalty abolitionists often speak of how difficult years of delays are for
victims’ families. Parks has heard those arguments, as well as arguments that
the state shouldn’t kill even people who’ve done unspeakable things. Opponents
also call it wrong to allow killers’ families to suffer because of what the
killers have done.
But
Parks said he figures the opponents haven’t been through the type of torment
his family has.
His
life is worse in so many ways without Donovan — the writer, the artist, the
kindhearted soul who seemed to mint grace.
Surely,
the brother thought, life without Wilson breathing would be better.
The brothers
When
Christopher Parks was little, he had nightmares.
He
asked his brother if he could sleep in the bed with him. Donovan — 6 years
older, the gentle type — told Christopher to climb into the twin bed.
Christopher instantly felt safe, that night and many others, because of
Donovan.
Donovan
helped Christopher believe in the goodness of people.
But
Christopher still had nightmares. On March 27, 1996, he woke up from one about
something happening to Donovan.
Shaken,
he walked into the den and found Donovan stretched out on the couch.
“Donovan,”
Christopher recalls saying, “I’m so glad to see you because I dreamed someone
murdered you.”
“I’m
fine,” Donovan reassured calmly.
Hours
later Donovan really was dead.
The gang, the helper
As
Wilson’s attorneys tried to halt the execution, they asked the Board of Pardons
and Paroles to consider the inmate’s childhood. The lawyers said myriad traumas
had left Wilson with neurological damage hampering his decision-making skills.
His
mother Charlene Cox, who declined to comment but asked the parole board for
mercy, used drugs and drank in the four or five months before she realized she
was pregnant, the clemency petition said. She took little Marion around South
Georgia as she bounced between toxic and abusive boyfriends, who made Marion
live in filth. The boy often ran away just to find food.
Eventually
he roamed the streets and joined the Folk Nation gang. In early 1996, his
girlfriend was pregnant with Tykecia, but the girl would never meet her father
as a free man.
On
March 28, 1996, Donovan Parks went to Walmart to buy cat food after Bible
study. Wilson was at the store with fellow Folk member Robert Butts. Butts knew
Parks because they’d worked together at Burger King.
Butts
said they needed a ride. Parks said OK.
As
Parks drove, Butts pulled a sawed-off shotgun from inside the sleeve of his
black Colorado Rockies jacket. Someone — Wilson claimed Butts, prosecutors
claimed Wilson — pulled Parks’ tie and forced him out of the car. As Wilson
would later tell it, he only thought Butts was going to rob Parks.
Someone
— it still isn’t clear who — fired one shot into Parks’ head.
The
motive to kill, prosecutors said, was elevated status in the gang.
After
the men drove away in the Acura, Parks’ father, Freddie, pulled up. His
girlfriend’s house happened to be nearby. The pellets in the shot had so badly
mangled Donovan Parks’ face, the father didn’t recognize the son.
‘I haven’t been the best’
Christopher
Parks has been to the death chamber before.
It
was in May 2018. He sat with his wife, Crystal, and saw Butts on the gurney, IV
lines in his veins, eyes closed.
Butts
did not apologize. His last words were a mumble: “It burns, man.” It looked
peaceful to Parks. That made him angry.
“I think about how my brother was snatched from his car by his
necktie, and his necktie was so tight he probably couldn’t breathe or speak to
beg for his life. I think about how he was laid down on the cold asphalt and he
was murdered — for being nice,”
Parks said with contempt. “What I saw in that execution
was humane. It was a man being put to sleep as if he were getting a root
canal.”
It
bothered Parks that Butts didn’t apologize. But he eventually decided it didn’t
matter, and it wouldn’t matter if Wilson did. Words, Parks said, can’t help.
In
the past year, knowledge that Butts is dead hasn’t helped Parks either, but he
said that’s only because he wanted Wilson dead too.
The
murder hurts Parks, a father of four, every day. It has made him less of a
believer in the goodness of the people. It has made him angrier, sadder and
more cynical.
He
admits: “I haven’t been the best son I could’ve been. I
haven’t been the best father I could’ve been. I haven’t been the best husband I
could’ve been.”
He
wants to change.
‘Real justice’
As Parks
prepared for Wilson’s execution, he grew angry again.
He
thought about how much the government had spent to keep Wilson alive and
fighting. He thought about seeing his brother in the hospital. His head was
wrapped in a bandage to hold in his brains, and his face seemed frozen in the
last expression it held in life: he looked terrified, the brother thought.
Parks wishes he could go just one day without seeing that image in his mind.
But Parks
liked to imagine the execution, one part in particular.
The “real
justice,” he said, would come right before Wilson entered the death chamber,
knowing he would die. It’s a blessing for most people not to know when they’ll
die, Parks said, but he liked that Wilson would be deprived of that blessing
because Wilson and Butts took it from his brother.
After
that moment passed for Wilson, the 42-year-old was on the gurney, not
apologizing, just like Butts. Parks was watching. Tykecia Wilson was somewhere
hurting, wishing her dad didn’t have to go, wondering why the Parks, Butts and
Wilson families all had to know death like this.
The last
breath came at 9:52 p.m.
Parks had
decided many years ago that his recovery from his brother’s death required the
deaths of the men responsible for his brother’s death. Now he had his
wish.
He left
the death house for the last time, hoping to heal.
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://www.ajc.com/news/local/killer-executed-tonight-for-murder-off-duty-prison-guard/DrnmyOYvxO0gjKuvQVHVqL/
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