Ellis Wayne Felker (June 1, 1948 – November 15, 1996) was an American convicted and executed in 1996 in Georgia for the 1981 murder of Evelyn Joy Ludlam, a young woman who was working as a waitress while she attended college.
Felker's appeal in May 1996 to the US Supreme Court was considered a test of the new Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which had been signed in April 1996.
[1] Given outstanding issues, four media sources petitioned the Georgia court in 2000 for DNA testing of Felker against evidence recovered from Ludlam's body.
Felker is notable as the first subject in the United States for which the court agreed to post-conviction DNA testing of an executed person.
She was working her way through Macon Junior College (now part of Middle Georgia State University) as a cocktail waitress at a motel in Warner Robins.
Joy Ludlam hoped to change jobs because serving as a cocktail waitress did not agree with her religious beliefs.
Improvements in forensic testing have led most states other than Georgia to drop the use of such hair evidence, in favor of DNA analysis.
Felker's expert concluded that Ludlam had died three days before the body was found, which put into question his likelihood as a suspect, claiming that he had an alibi during the period of police surveillance.
After a five-day trial, the Houston County, Georgia jury convicted Felker in 1983 of the rape, murder, aggravated sodomy, and false imprisonment of Ludlam.
The defense filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in US District Court on several grounds, including that the state had illegally withheld exculpatory evidence.
[8] The US Supreme Court heard his habeas corpus appeal, as a test of the new Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), enacted on April 24, 1996.
After filing in September 1996 for a writ of mandamus with the Georgia Supreme Court, Felker's attorneys received a total of four new boxes of evidence, which the prosecution had recently found in a storage room.
It also held that "a custodian of public records complies with an ORA request when he grants reasonable access to the files in his custody."
Concerned that several convicted men had been exonerated, Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in the state in 2000 and said that there appeared to be too many inequities in how the penalty was sentenced and administered.
That is believed to be the first time in the United States that a court agreed to post-conviction DNA testing of a person who had been executed after being convicted of rape and murder.