The State is seeking the death penalty against Timothy Carl Dawson, who has been charged with four murders and numerous other crimes in Fulton County, and against Carzell Moore, in his new sentencing trial following his conviction for the 1976 murder and rape of Teresa Allen in Monroe County. See Moore v. State, 240 Ga. 807 243 SE2d 1 1978. Challenges were raised in both cases to the State’s use of electrocution as the method of executing persons sentenced to death for capital offenses in Georgia. The trial court in Dawson’s case found that the use of electrocution violates the State and Federal Constitutions; the trial court in Moore’s case upheld the constitutionality of the use of electrocution. This Court granted Dawson and Moore’s applications for interim review, consolidated the cases, and directed the parties to address whether electrocution remains a constitutional method of execution in Georgia. Upon considered review of this difficult issue, we conclude that future use of electrocution as a means of executing death sentences in Georgia would violate the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in Art. I, Sec. I, Par. XVII of the Georgia Constitution. Therefore, we direct that any future executions of death sentences in Georgia be carried out by lethal injection in accordance with OCGA § 17-10-38, as amended.
1. Both the Georgia Constitution and the Constitution of the United States proscribe punishments that are “cruel and unusual.” U.S. Const., Amend. VIII; Ga. Const. of 1983, Art. I, Sec. I, Par. XVII. Long before the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution came to be recognized as fully applicable, through the Fourteenth Amendment, to states’ powers to punish their own citizens, see Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 667 82 SC 1417, 8 LE 758 1962, Georgia constitutional law proscribed this State’s use of cruel and unusual punishments. Ga. Const. 1861, Art. I, Sec. 4901. Thus, while this Court consults decisions interpreting the Eighth Amendment to the Federal Constitution and must give full effect to that Amendment, this Court has recognized that “Federal constitutional standards represent the minimum, not the maximum, protection that this state must afford its citizens cit.,” Fleming v. Zant, 259 Ga. 687, 690 3 386 SE2d 339 1989, and we have explicitly held that in interpreting the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment found in the Georgia Constitution, the applicable standard is “the standard of the people of Georgia, not the national standard.” Id.
