The Blood on Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s Hands

Recently, in his article “Alabama Man’s Death Sentence Is Commuted as Governor Cites Thin Evidence,” about how Alabama Governor Kay Ivey commuted Toforest Johnson’s death sentence to life without the possibility of parole, New York Times reporter Eduardo Medina observed “Alabama has executed 27 prisoners since [Ivey] became governor in 2017.” He reported, “Since the 1970s, more than 75 people have been executed in Alabama,” and “Only a handful of states have had more executions in that time[.]”

In her statement about commuting Johnson’s sentence, Ivey said: “Throughout my tenure as governor, we have ensured justice could effectively be delivered through capital punishment. And that will continue.” She also said: “Capital punishment is too important a tool for Alabama to not approach it carefully and seriously.”

Other than her promise that Alabama’s death penalty machinery will hum on with her as governor, which although won’t be much longer will be long enough for at least one more currently scheduled execution, the rest of her statement, to put it politely, was cow dung.

Alabama has savagely tortured to death seven men by gassing them with nitrogen during Ivey’s tenure, and she’s been at the helm when more than one “death penalty volunteer” committed legal suicide, preferring death over lengthy incarceration. She’s presided, disproportionately, over the execution of poor Black men because it is indigent Black men who are disproportionately sentenced to death. She’s allowed men a jury voted should get a life sentence to be executed because of “judicial override,” even though she enacted the law banning that practice which was shown to have racial and political overtones. She was the state’s chief executive during the palpably botched lethal injection of Torrey McNabb (in 2017), the bloody and botched lethal injection attempt of Doyle Hamm (in 2018), the execution of an 83-year-old, Walter Moody, Jr. (in 2018), the botched lethal injection attempt of Alan Miller (in 2022), and the botched execution of Joe James, Jr. (in 2022) which experts have called the longest lethal injection in U.S. history, with it taking over three hours for James to die.

Throughout Ivey’s tenure she has delivered injustice through her commitment to the death penalty, which is grounded in racial prejudice and a lack of humanity. Sure you can point to a few recent examples where Ivey commuted death sentences like Johnson’s—two others exactly; her commutation percentage is 10 percent. This measly showing of executive clemency, a power Ivey denied in a case when even the victim’s family asked, is outweighed by the scope of her evil-doings when it comes to deciding, ultimately, if men should be executed.

You think “evil-doings” is too strong? Well I don’t think it goes far enough.

Whether it’s live-streamed and beamed to screens around the world or whether it takes place shielded behind prison walls, whether it’s simple and serene and the condemned snorts and nods off or whether blood is spurted around the room, the murder of another human by the state is a grotesquely evil “tool” as Ivey calls it.

And how can it—the death penalty—be viewed as anything other than a “tool” of torture, fear, and racial hatred given its evil history including under Ivey’s rule?

And I don’t want to hear about polls, how this is what the people want: the state paying exorbitant sums of money to torture and kill—which is not even a deterrent—instead of locking killers up for life. Because when people have it explained like that, invariably, polls change.

Overwhelmingly, when good people are presented with good reasons why the state shouldn’t kill people for the sake of “justice,” they don’t want the state doing it.

What we need is politicians who have the conscience to do what is right when it comes to the death penalty, and that is to unequivocally do what they can to end it, politicians unlike Kay Ivey.

Let’s consider gassing human beings to death for the sake of justice for a moment.

What about Alabama’s torturously gassing men to death and doing it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again—until the Supreme Court said “stop”—shows Alabama has approached capital punishment “carefully and seriously?”

In Florida, you have Governor Ron DeSantis’s unprecedented and merciless state-killing spree. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee has a lethal injection fiasco on his hands. But neighboring Alabama is not a darn sight better and historically it may be worse. Governor Kay Ivey has been a big part of that. And history won’t forget it.