BUTTS Co. – Georgia has executed Joshua Daniel Bishop for the 1994 Baldwin County murder of Leverett Morrison, the office of the Georgia attorney general announced Thursday.

Bishop, 41, was put to death by lethal injection at 9:27 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Butts County. The sentence was carried out shortly after the United States Supreme Court denied Bishop’s request for a stay of execution.

When Bishop was 19, he helped kill Leverett Morrison, 35, so he could take the keys to his Jeep. Bishop tried to grab the keys out of Morrison’s pocket while he was asleep. When he woke up, Bishop and an accomplice hit him with a car battery, and then beat him with a rod until he was dead.

They left Morrison’s body between two trash bins. The accomplice received life in prison.

A possible reprieve from the nation’s highest court was all Bishop had left after the Georgia Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon declined to halt his execution. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles also denied his plea for clemency Thursday.

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