Gov. Kay Ivey Friday set an April 24 execution date for James Osgood, convicted in 2014 of the rape and murder of Tracy Brown in 2010. If the execution goes forward, Osgood will be the second person put to death by the state of Alabama this year. (Alabama Department of Corrections)
Gov. Kay Ivey has scheduled an execution for late April, the second of the year.
James Osgood will be executed by lethal injection on the evening of April 24, according to the governor’s office. Ivey set an execution period between midnight on April 24 and 6 a.m. April 25.
A jury in Chilton County in 2014 convicted Osgood, 55, of the 2010 murder of Tracy Brown, 44, and sentenced him to death. According to court documents, Osgood and his girlfriend Tonya Vandyke accompanied Brown to her home where the two eventually raped and murdered her.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case to the Chilton County Circuit Court in 2016 after the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice issues, argued that the judge in the case made an error when giving instructions to the jury.
The appeals court ordered that Chilton County Circuit Court repeat the penalty phase of the trial, but Osgood in 2018 requested he be sentenced to death, saying he believes in an “eye for eye.”
The state in February executed Demetrius Frazier by nitrogen gas for the 1991 rape and murder of Pauline Brown. Ivey commuted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Myers earlier this month, saying she was “not so convinced of his guilt as to approve of his execution.”