ATLANTA AP – Federal appeals judges have rejected a new sentencing hearing for Roy Willard Blankenship, condemned to death three times for murdering a 78-year-old woman who was brutally raped in her Savannah apartment 30 years ago.

Blankenship claimed ineffective assistance of counsel in his third sentencing hearing, in 1986, after the Georgia Supreme Court had twice overturned his sentence in the 1978 death of Sarah Mims Bowen from heart failure during the attack.