Lawyers seek to delay Georgia execution set for next week

ATLANTA (AP) — Lawyers for a Georgia man scheduled to be put to death next week for killing an 8-year-old girl 46 years ago are trying to delay the execution.

Virgil Delano Presnell Jr. is scheduled to die May 17 at the state prison in Jackson by injection of the sedative pentobarbital.

He killed the 8-year-old girl and raped her 10-year-old friend after abducting them as they walked home from school in Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, on May 4, 1976.

Lawyers representing the Federal Defender Program, which represents Presnell, filed the lawsuit and an emergency motion Monday in Fulton County Superior Court.

His death sentence was overturned in 1992 but was reinstated in March 1999.