A Botched Execution in Alabama

Sara Mayeux has a fascinating
review-essay in Public Books on the history of
executions and incareration, and on whether and how to judge the
past from the perspective of the present. There’s too much here to
summarize in a brief blog post, but I can at least give you a sense
of the article’s flavor by quoting her concluding
anecdote. This section of the story stars the infamous Alabama
governor George Wallace and a pragmatic liberal Democrat, neither
of whom takes the position you might expect. It ends on a note that
foreshadows last week’s slapstick snuff-film of an
execution in Oklahoma.

The context is

the execution, in Alabama in 1983, of one John
Louis Evans, who, in the course of “a two-month crime spree” of
“nine kidnappings and thirty armed robberies,” killed a Mobile
pawnshop owner in front of his two children. George Wallace was
beginning his final term as Alabama’s governor when he was asked to
sign Evans’s death warrant. Wallace’s notoriety, of course, rests
primarily on the day in 1963 that he stood in a doorway at the
University of Alabama to keep black students out. But it is also
worth noting that his 1968 third-party presidential campaign
perfected the “tough-on-crime” sloganeering that would dominate
much of American electoral politics into the 1990s.

Privately, George Wallace had long harbored doubts about capital
punishment. In 1964, he told his law clerk that he thought it
should be ruled unconstitutional. By 1983, Wallace had survived a
shooting, converted to born-again Christianity, and recanted his
segregationism. In Mandery’s words, his “reservations about the
constitutionality of capital punishment had evolved into full-blown
opposition.” The night before Evans was due to be executed, Wallace
telephoned his lieutenant governor “in tears,” Mandery recounts.
Wallace said that “he had been up all night ‘praying the Bible,’
and couldn’t bring himself to sign the warrant.” That lieutenant
governor was the former law clerk, Bill Baxley, with whom Wallace
had shared his reservations 20 years before. Baxley was a liberal
Democrat—as Alabama’s attorney general, he had earned the wrath of
the Ku Klux Klan for his investigation and prosecution of civil
rights cases—who supported the death penalty. He convinced George
Wallace that there was no political choice but to sign the warrant.
Mandery ends the anecdote here, but I looked up what happened
next….Evans was strapped into an electric chair and, after two
botched jolts that left him burned but alive, was shocked to death
on the state of Alabama’s third attempt.

Read the rest here.