Alabama executed Casey McWhorter earlier this month. He was convicted and sentenced to die in 1994 for the robbery and murder of Edward Lee Williams in 1993.
McWhorter was one of three teenagers, one of whom was Williams’ son, charged with the murder. But he was the only one sentenced to death because he was the only defendant who was 18 at the time of the crime. The other two, Edward Lee Williams, Jr., who was 14, and Steven Daniel Miner, who was 16, pleaded guilty to a lesser offense and were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, AL.com reports. The jury’s vote to recommend a death sentence for McWhorter was 10-2.
In their appeal for a stay to the U.S. Supreme Court, McWhorter’s lawyers noted that he was sentenced to death for a crime he committed just three months past his 18th birthday. “In other words, he received a capital sentence even though he was a juvenile.” According to Alabama law, jurors must be at least 19 years old. “If 18-year-olds are juveniles, as Alabama law has deemed, then they should not be eligible for the death penalty for crimes committed as juveniles,” they stated.
The Court denied his appeal.
McWhorter was killed by lethal injection. But the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that the state attorney general can proceed with his plan to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas, CBS News reports. It was a 6-2 decision by the all-Republican court.
No other state has ever attempted to kill a person using nitrogen gas, although Oklahoma and Mississippi have also included the method in their execution protocols.
Smith, who is one of two men convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, has already been subjected to one botched execution. Corrections officials ended their attempt to kill Smith in November of last year after trying and failing for over an hour to find a usable vein for its lethal drugs. His was the third execution in 2022 that was botched and the fourth since 2018. All were related to the execution team’s inability to insert IV lines.
Smith is scheduled to be killed on January 25.
