Alabama Death Row inmate ‘at peace’ three weeks before execution

Casey McWhorter is scheduled to be the 1st man from Marshall County to die by execution.

McWhorter, now 49 years old, was sentenced to the death penalty in 1994, following the 1993 murder of Edward Lee Williams.

Earlier this month, Governor Kay Ivey set a 30-hour time frame for McWhorter’s execution. It is set to start at 12:00am on Thursday, November 16th and runs through 6:00am on Friday, November 17th.

With his execution date in just 3 weeks, he is now sharing more about his life prior to the murder, his life in prison, and his thoughts on his execution. Several recordings of conversations with his Spiritual Advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, have been turned into a new book: The Casey McWhorter Tapes.

That book will soon be available on Amazon.

In one of the recordings, shared with News 19 on Friday, McWhorter spoke about his family. “I know I let them down quite a few times in my life, so I’d like to leave them with something to smile about,” he said. His Spiritual Advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood said McWhorter has had a long time to think about the murder. “This is somebody who recognizes that they were part of an awful crime,” he said.

“I mean, he’s had 30 years to think about what he did and he feels disgusted by it and saddened by it,” Hood said.

Over the years, McWhorter has made several attempts to appeal his sentence, however, those have all failed. Now, the group, Death Penalty Action, is leading a new charge to try and stop his execution.

They’ve launched an online petition, to try and bring attention to McWhorter’s situation.

“We’re talking about a guy who was just barely 18 at the time of his crimes, barely an adult,” Death Penalty Action Executive Director, Abraham Bonowitz, said. “Also, a person who did not have a unanimous jury.”

Bonowitz is referring to a non-unanimous death penalty vote. In Alabama, when a jury votes on conviction in a death penalty case, only 10 of the 12 jurors need to agree. Bonowitz says there are several reasons they believe McWhorter should not be executed.

Death Penalty Action is against the death penalty and certain methods of execution. “We know we can be safe from dangerous offenders, or people who have done awful things earlier in their life, and hold them accountable without executions because that’s what we do in the vast majority of cases,” Bonowitz said.

He said in most cases, “murderers that are punished to death are not punished by death, they’re punished by death by incarceration these days.”

Rev. Hood said he speaks to McWhorter almost daily at this point. Hood had this to say about McWhorter’s mindset going into the execution: “He keeps saying, and I believe him, that he’s at peace.”

McWhorter is currently incarcerated at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama.

Source: WHNT news, Staff, October 28, 2023

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