his request for clemency. He was also scheduled to be executed alongside Alpha Otis O'Daniel Stephens, another Georgia death row inmate, but the U.S. Supreme Court granted Stephens a last-minute stay of execution by a 5-4 vote, while Smith, who had exhausted all of his court appeals by then, had his request denied by a 7-2 vote. Parole Board Chairman Mobley Howell said of Smith's case, "There can be no doubt John Eldon Smith was a willing and active participant in the crime of murder." Smith's execution was scheduled to take place on December 15, 1983, at 8:00 a.m., which, according to a former prison guard who was staffed to work at Smith's execution, attracted many anti-death penalty protests and Atlanta-based television stations. Smith was executed by electric chair at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson, Georgia, thereby becoming the first person to be executed in Georgia since the electrocution of Bernard Dye on October 16, 1964, which occurred prior to the death penalty moratorium established by Furman v. Georgia. The prison announced that Smith's time of death occurred at approximately 8:15 a.m. Years after his execution, his final words would be purported to have been, "Well, the Lord is going to get another one." In reality, contemporaneous sources state that Smith had no official final words and did not request any specific witnesses to attend his execution, although reporters noted that he told the warden shortly before his execution, "My final statement will be delivered by Father Wise" (referring to then-prison chaplain Reverend Richard Wise) and that he also told guards as they were strapping him into the electric chair, "Hey, there ain't no point in pulling it so tight." Following Smith's execution, anti-death penalty activist Henry Schwarzschild noted that John Smith's execution ushered in a new era of executions in the United States wherein the death penalty would be applied more frequently: "We have entered a new period where executions are utterly likely." John Maree was paroled from prison after serving 13 years of his sentence. In 2010, at the age of 71, Rebecca Machetti was paroled 36 years into her sentence and changed her surname to Lorusso to match that of her new common-law husband at the time. In September 2020, at the age of 81, she died of complications related to COVID-19. See also Capital punishment in Georgia (U.S. state) Capital punishment in