The Supreme Court of Georgia has just issued a stay of execution for Ray Jefferson Cromartie, who was scheduled to be executed Wednesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, for the 1994 murder of Richard Slysz in Thomas County.
The order states that the motion to stay the pending execution order “is provisionally granted until further order of this Court to the extent that a stay is necessary at all in the light of the arguable voidness of the pending execution order.”
The Court is directing attorneys for the State and Cromartie to file briefs addressing the procedural matter of “’whether the pending execution order is void’ because it was filed by the trial court while the Supreme Court had jurisdiction over the case.”
The Court said the “question is whether the trial court lacked jurisdiction to file the pending execution order because at the time it did so, an application for appeal filed by Cromartie’s attorneys already was pending in this Court.”
