In the early 1990s, Mostiler represented all the indigent inmates in Spalding County, Georgia for a flat fee, handling hundreds of felony cases. What they do charge is that his original lawyer, Johnny Mostiler, was a racist, regarded him with contempt, and did next to nothing to defend him at trial. Addicted to cocaine and a small-time drug-dealer, Osborne killed his two victims in a dispute over $400. Osborne and his attorneys do not dispute that he committed the crime. The history of his case epitomized how the inherently barbaric death penalty system in the US is also permeated by racism and stacked against poor and working-class defendants. Osborne, who is African-American, was sentenced to death for the August 1990 fatal shootings of Linda Lisa Seaborne and Arthur Jones.
Those appealing unsuccessfully to the Georgia pardon board for a commutation of Osborne’s sentence included former president Jimmy Carter, former US Attorney General Griffin Bell, and Norman Fletcher, the ex-chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, who said he had intervened due to the “extraordinary nature” of the case. Osborne became the second prisoner to be sent to his death in Georgia, and the fourth in the US, since the Supreme Court ruled in April that the lethal-injection procedure does not violate the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Another Georgia inmate, William Earl Lund, was the first prisoner to die by lethal injection following the high-court ruling. His death by lethal injection followed a decision Monday by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denying him clemency, and the refusal by the Georgia Supreme Court just hours before the execution to issue a stay. Death row inmate Curtis Osborne was executed Wednesday evening, just after 7 p.m., in the death chamber at a prison in Jackson, Georgia.
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