Georgia leads US in executions this year, set for ninth

(AP) — Lawyers seeking to block Tuesday's scheduled execution of a man convicted of killing his father-in-law after a custody fight over a young son have argued a juror lied about her own messy relationship history and swayed fellow jurors to vote for a death sentence.

William Sallie should be granted a new trial because of the alleged juror bias, but courts haven't properly considered that evidence because he missed a filing deadline by eight days at a time when he didn't have a lawyer, his lawyers said in court filings.

The 50-year-old inmate, who was convicted of murder in the fatal shooting of John Lee Moore in March 1990, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Jackson.

At his second trial in 2001, a woman eventually chosen as a juror lied during jury selection and failed to disclose domestic violence, messy divorces and a child custody battle that were "bizarrely similar" to Sallie's case, his lawyers said.

Furthermore, they argue, even if the issues were identical, the federal appeals court in Atlanta is bound by its own precedent — which doesn't allow such an extraordinary admission of the procedurally barred evidence — and not by the future possibility of new precedent from the Supreme Court.