MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) -- The Cobb County District Attorney's Office will seek the death penalty for an Alabama woman charged in the burning death of another woman.
Anjail Muhammad, 23, is charged with murder in the May 25, 2003 death of Nodiana Antoine, 18.
Antoine died two months after being set on fire outside a gas station.
Cobb County District Attorney Pat Head said he is seeking the death penalty because of the cruel nature of the crime and because of the danger setting someone on fire in a gas station parking lot posed to others. Muhammad sprayed about 63 cents worth of gasoline onto Antoine before returning to the car to get a lighter, he said.
Antoine spent two months in the burn unit at Grady Memorial Hospital before dying last July.
Police said an argument between the two women, who had been living together in a white Pontiac Grand Prix, led to the incident. But they would not elaborate on the nature of the argument or the relationship between Muhammad and Antoine.
Currently, only one female inmate is on death row in Georgia. Kelly Renee Gissendaner, 36, was convicted in Gwinnett County in November 1998 for conspiring with her boyfriend in the stabbing death of her husband, Doug Gissendaner.
The state has record of only one woman being executed in Georgia, said Scheree Lipscomb, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections.
In 1945, 44-year-old Lena Baker, a mother of three, was executed in the electric chair after being convicted of murdering Ernest Knight in southwest Georgia. Controversy over that case has persisted for years because Baker, a black housekeeper, claimed Knight, a white man, was abusing her and locking her in a gristmill after she tried to end a sexual relationship between them.
