Alabama provides the greatest arguments against the death penalty

I have seen three executions. I hope I never see a fourth.

Capital punishment is violence. But the state does all it can to conceal that fact. The viewing areas outside the death chamber are still and silent. Bright light floods the small room where people die. The warden pronouncing the sentence speaks in clipped, measured tones, saying no more than needed. You’re expected to view the act as a bloodless execution of justice.

Sometimes the human being on the gurney dies without showing visible distress. I say visible because in a lethal injection, the second drug in the mix stops the condemned person’s muscles before the third stops his heart. If the first drug has not rendered him unconscious — and midazolam, which Alabama uses, was not formulated to do that — you may be witnessing agony masked by paralysis.

But often, the pain bursts through. Ronald Bert Smith gasped for air for 13 minutes during his 2016 execution. Torrey McNabb, whose execution I witnessed the following year, raised his arm and lurched during the execution.

I also witnessed Nathaniel Woods die in 2020. And I knew the injustice of what I was seeing.

Woods was sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of three Birmingham police officers. Except Woods didn’t kill the officers. He was present when a man named Kerry Spencer opened fire, killing the men.

Woods did not fire the gun. There was no evidence he even held one. Spencer, who remains on death row, said Woods didn’t shoot the officers. Woods was sentenced to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But despite these facts, and widespread condemnation, Alabama’s killing machine rumbled on. Gov. Kay Ivey said Woods bragged about the killings and didn’t act to stop them — terrible if true, but not capital crimes. Woods said nothing as the chemicals that ended his life entered his body, only holding up a single finger as a sign of his Islamic faith.

I don’t think the state should execute anyone. I don’t remember a time I ever felt otherwise. My parents, staunchly anti-abortion, signed anti-death penalty petitions at our Catholic parish. The appalling racial disparities in sentencing only cemented my opposition.

But Alabama’s use of the death penalty should make even hardened capital punishment supporters pause. There’s no better example than the nitrogen gas execution scheduled for March 12.

A jury in 1992 convicted Charles Lee Burton in connection with a robbery the previous year at a Talladega AutoZone. During the robbery, Derrick DeBruce, one of the men involved, shot and killed Doug Battle, a store customer.

Burton was part of the robbery. But he did not kill Battle. And he was outside the store when the shooting occurred.

A jury sentenced DeBruce to death. But that was commuted to life in prison after a federal court in 2014 found that DeBruce’s trial attorney did a poor job and denied him adequate representation. (DeBruce died in prison in 2020.)

Burton also received a death sentence. Under state law, participation in a felony leading to another person’s death can lead to a death sentence, whether or not the person killed anyone.

Burton is now 75 years old. He is in a wheelchair. He is not a threat or danger to anyone.

Battle’s daughter has asked for clemency. Several jurors who sentenced Burton to death have joined her. One wrote an op-ed for al.com expressing her regrets for her choice.

In another state, this all might make leaders pause before subjecting an elderly man to suffocation.

But this is Alabama. Attorney General Steve Marshall, who wants to be our next U.S. senator, clings to a pig-headed, circular logic that because the courts have upheld Burton’s sentence, Burton’s sentence is correct.

Ivey has not commented on the clemency petition. But I am not hopeful. Ivey’s record on the death penalty is terrible.

Not uniformly so. The governor last year commuted the death sentence of Rocky Myers amid questionable evidence of his guilt. But she also scheduled a large number of executions last year. When Corrections botched three straight executions in 2022, leaving men cut up or stranded in gurneys for hours, she responded by letting Corrections investigate itself and by formulating a new policy extending the window for executions, making it harder to stop them.

In all likelihood, corrections officers next month will lift an elderly man out of a wheelchair, bind him to a gurney, tie a mask to his face and flood his lungs with pure nitrogen until he dies.

You tell me what crime that will deter. You tell me how that will make us safer. Alabama’s homicide rates, among the highest in the nation, suggest the death penalty isn’t doing that.

All it does is satisfy the bloodlust of a handful of rigid-minded politicians, whose desires seem to take priority over facts, survivors’ feelings and demonstrated incompetence.

That’s the greatest argument against the death penalty. And it’s one Alabama keeps making with every unjust and torturous execution.

Source: alabamareflector.com, Brian Lyman, February 23, 2026. Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006. Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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