Stephen Anthony Mobley

Stephen Anthony Mobley, a 39-year-old white male, was executed by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Georgia on March 1, 2005. Mobley was found guilty of the 1991 murder of John C. Collins, a 24-year-old white male. Mobley, who was 25-years old when he committed the capital crime, was sentenced to death on February 28, 1994.

Shortly after midnight on February 17, 1991, Mobley robbed a Domino’s pizza store in Hall County, Georgia where he shot John Collins, the store manager, in the back of the head with a Walther .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he had stolen previously. The physical evidence from the scene was consistent with a statement Mobley later made to a cellblock inmate that Collins, who was the only one in Domino’s at the time, was on his knees when Mobley shot him.

Approximately three weeks after which Mobley had committed six additional armed robberies of restaurants and dry-cleaning shops, Mobley used the same pistol while robbing a dry cleaning store and tried to dispose of it by tossing it out his car window onto the side of a road when he realized that an unmarked police car was following him. The pistol was later recovered and Mobley was arrested after a high-speed chase.

Mobley made statements to police confessing to the murder of Collins and the robbery of the Domino’s pizza store. In response to Mobley's statement to police that on the night of the crimes he was en route from his residence to a family member's home where he was not expected, and that he robbed the pizza store because it was the only open establishment he passed, the State introduced testimony establishing that out of the three routes available to Mobley, only one passed the pizza store, and that this route exceeded by over 10 miles the next shortest route to the family member's house.

Following his incarceration, Mobley had the word "Domino" tattooed on his back, placed a Domino's pizza box in his cell on the wall, carried a domino piece in his pocket with the same dot configuration as that used by Domino's Pizza, told a guard that he wished the guard had been up at Domino's instead of that other boy, in referring to Collins stated that "If that fat son-of-a-bitch had not started crying, I would never have shot him," told another guard that he was "going to apply for the night manager's job at Domino's because he knew they needed one," told another guard that the guard was "beginning to look more and more like a Domino's pizza boy everyday," told another guard that "anywhere Mobley was put [in jail] he'd kill anybody he came in contact with," and forcibly sodomized his cellmate on two separate occasions.

On March 19, 1991, Mobley was indicted in Hall County. On February 20, 1994, he was found guilty of malice murder and felony murder based upon the aggravating factors of armed robbery, three counts of aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm in the commission of a crime. On February 25, 2005, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles denied a clemency appeal in which six of his trial jurors asked that Mobley not be executed.

References

* Michelangelo Delfino and Mary E. Day, "Death Penalty USA 2005 -2006", (2008), 37-38.
* "Mobley v. State" (1995) 265 Ga. 292.
* "Mobley v. State" (1995) 455 S.E.2d 61.
* "Turpin v. Mobley" (1988) 502 S.E.2d 458.

See also

* Capital punishment in Georgia (U.S. state)
* Capital punishment in the United States