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Death Row Inmate Scheduled To Be Executed Next Week

ARKANSAS (KFSM)—An inmate on death row is set to die next Thursday (Nov. 9), but the American Bar Association and the killer’s lawyers are trying to stop it. It...

ARKANSAS (KFSM)—An inmate on death row is set to die next Thursday (Nov. 9), but the American Bar Association and the killer’s lawyers are trying to stop it.

It will be Arkansas’ first execution since it put four men to death at the end of April. Just before those executions, Jack Greene’s former girlfriend broke her silence to 5NEWS in her first on-camera interview.

Donna Johnson said Greene abused and tortured her for years.

“I’m always on edge,” she said. “I myself cannot be at peace until I know 100 percent that he’s dead.”

Johnson and Greene met in 1984 in North Carolina. They eventually moved to Springdale and had a daughter. Johnson said that soon after, she realized Greene had a dark side. Johnson said Greene told her if she ever left him, he would kill her and her entire family. During July of 1991, she decided to leave him.

Records show Greene went back to North Carolina, kidnapped his niece and killed his brother. His niece, 16 at the time, survived. A week later, he went back to Arkansas, which Johnson believes to look for her, but police had surveillance watching the house where she was staying. Greene went to Sidney Burnett’s house, a pastor in Johnson County and someone Donna Johnson confided in.

“He beat that old man, tied him to a chair, beat that old man with a hominy can, slit him from ear to ear, stabbed him,” Johnson explained back in April.

During October 1992, a jury sentenced Greene to death for the slaying of the pastor. Greene's attorney said Greene is delusional and that the death penalty is not the appropriate punishment.

“It’s not constitutional to execute someone who is suffering from a mental illness that prevents him from rationally understanding his execution,” John Williams, Greene’s federal public defender, said.

In the meantime, Greene waits on death row at the Varner Unit in Eastern Arkansas.

The American Bar Association wrote a letter to Gov. Asa Hutchinson asking for Greene’s clemency because of his mental illness, but the governor has yet to make a decision.

Read the full letter,  here.

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