The last execution

The Texas death chamber in Huntsville, Texas on June 23, 2000. (Photo by Joe Raedle / Newsmakers)

One day Alabama will conduct its final execution.

The witnesses present won’t know that, of course. If capital punishment disappears, it will be by law or ruling that comes after these men and women gather in the small, tomb-like room at Atmore Correctional Facility.

They will look through a window framed in a concrete wall and watch a person die. As hundreds of people have before. They will leave that grim scene not knowing anything will change.

But they will be the last witnesses to capital punishment in Alabama.

That day is far off in Alabama. The state last week executed Keith Edmund Gavin for the murder of William Clinton Clayton Jr. in 1998. He was the third person put to death by Alabama this year. The state plans a fourth execution in September.

More capital punishment awaits. As of April, there were 166 people on Alabama’s death row.  The U.S. Supreme Court has signaled that no level of injustice or incompetence will make them stop an execution. State officials have done everything they can to speed up the machinery of death.

It may seem that nothing can stop it. A majority of the states – 27, to be precise – still have the death penalty on the books.

But do you know how many have conducted executions this year?

Five, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC): Texas; Oklahoma; Missouri; Georgia and Alabama. Utah is scheduled to carry out an execution next month. Idaho attempted to conduct one in February but failed.

And if you look through all the executions conducted over the last five years, the number of states on the list only gets to 12. Even that’s overstating the case. Arkansas, Maryland and Iowa are on because of federal executions (Maryland and Iowa do not allow the death penalty in state law); Virginia, which conducted an execution in 2021, abolished the death penalty shortly after.

In other words, more than half the states with the death penalty haven’t employed it in recent years.

That’s a major decline from 1998. In that year alone, 18 states put people to death.

And fewer people are going to death row. In 2013, there were 79 death sentences handed down across 15 states. At the time, that was the second-lowest number of condemnations since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976.

In 2023? There were 21. And it had fallen to seven states.

Alabama is still sentencing people to death but at a far slower pace. In 1998, Alabama courts sent 25 people to death row. Last year, they sent three.

There have been some explanations for the decline of the death penalty, including declines in crime rates, better access to defense attorneys, the cost of trials and awareness of the stark racial disparities in applying the death penalty.

Alabama conducted 153 executions between 1927 and 1976, according to DPIC. And 127 of the people executed were Black.

No trend is inevitable. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it next to impossible for a death row inmate to challenge a sentence. The Republican nominee for president conducted 13 federal executions in the final six months of his first term in the White House, a spree The Associated Press said led to cut corners and at least one botched execution.

Nor does this mean that the alternative — life without parole — is free from misuse and injustice.

But that sentence is reversible. A death sentence is not.

The state of Alabama cannot go back in time and stop the execution of Nathaniel Woods, who was executed for being present when three police officers were killed, even though Woods was not the gunman.

If the state executes Toforest Johnson, a person even his local district attorney says deserves a new trial, there will be no opportunity to undo that.

I don’t expect the government to limit executions any time soon. If officials execute a person over the objections of the family members of his victims, no appeal to humanity or justice will stop them.

But Alabama is now an outlier in putting people to death.

And it would not be surprising if we end up as the last state with capital punishment. Our leaders’ minds are 30 years in the past. Cruelty is a proven formula for success in Alabama politics, and we have a federal judiciary that indulges officials’ gross irresponsibility with death.

But imagine what it will be like as other states end executions or, for whatever reason, can no longer carry them out.

Imagine the death march continuing because our leaders are too committed to the death penalty or too frightened of the political consequences to give it up. Think of Alabama continuing to tie people to a gurney, long after the rest of the nation has moved on.

The people who gather for Alabama’s last execution won’t know that it will be the last. All they will know is that the state has clung to a process poisoned by racism and conducted with cruelty.

And as they look through the glass and watch that process unfold one final time, they’ll see the cruelty that defines so much of Alabama government reflected at them.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and X.