The state of Alabama on Thursday executed a mentally disabled prisoner convicted of murdering a man in 1996, after the Supreme Court's conservative majority refused to suspend implementation of the death penalty.
In the second execution in the United States in a single day, Matthew Reeves, a 43-year-old black man, died after receiving the lethal injection local time in Holman prison, Alabama, without saying his last words or wanting to eat anything during the entire day, the EFE agency announced.
Reeves was pronounced dead at 9:24 p.m. local time, state Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.
Death row inmate Matthew Reeves, in a photo released by authorities. Alabama Correctional Facility / AP
His defense had tried to stop his execution
by arguing that he suffered from an intellectual disability and that they did not give him the necessary help to decide when in 2018 he was given documents that allowed him to change the method by which the death penalty would be applied.
The lawyers argued that it deprived him of the opportunity to choose a method
supposedly less "tortuous" than lethal injection
: the so-called nitrogen hypoxia, approved in the state in 2018 and that has never been used in the United States.
The new method would cause death by replacing the oxygen the inmate breathes with nitrogen.
In 2018, death row inmates in Alabama were given the opportunity to sign a form choosing one of two execution methods after lawmakers approved the use of nitrogen.
But Reeves was among the inmates who did not complete the form.
The attorneys claimed the state failed to help him understand the form.
But the state argued that he was not so handicapped that he could not understand the election.
[The suspect in the shooting death of a police officer at a traffic control in Texas was wanted for another murder in El Salvador]
Two courts validated the defense's request and stopped the execution, but the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which by a majority of 5 votes to 4 allowed the sentence to be applied.
For a murder in Selma in 1996
Reeves was sentenced to death for the murder of Willie Johnson, a man who picked him up on a freeway in Selma, Alabama, in 1996 and who died of a shotgun blast to the neck after $360 was stolen from him.
After the crime, Reeves would have gone to a party where he danced and imitated Johnson's death convulsions, authorities said.
A witness said Reeves' hands were still stained with blood from the celebration, according to a court ruling reported by The Associated Press.
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Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, where inmate Matthew Reeve was executed. Jay Reeves / AP
Gov. Kay Ivey, in a statement, said Johnson was "a good Samaritan who lent a hand" and was brutally murdered.
Reeves' death sentence "is just and justice was served tonight," she added.
The second execution in a day
Reeves' execution was the second so far in 2022 and also of the day in the United States:
a few hours earlier, the state of Oklahoma applied the death penalty to Donald Anthony Grant
, a black man convicted of murdering two hotel workers. during a robbery in 2001.
Grant, 46, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was pronounced dead at 10:16 a.m. local time after receiving a lethal injection at McAlester State Penitentiary, located 100 miles south of Tulsa, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
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The Supreme Court stays the execution of a convicted Latino in Texas
Sept.
9, 202100:23
In the last decade, polls indicate that the majority in the United States does not agree with the death penalty.
Convictions have plummeted and so have executions: from 98 in 1999 spread across the country to just 11 in 2021, limited to a handful of southern states like Texas, Georgia or Alabama.
[Oklahoma governor commutes Julius Jones's death sentence to life in prison at the last minute]
Twenty-three of the 50 states have now abolished the death penalty in their territory, while another three have an active moratorium and ten more have not carried out an execution for more than a decade, according to the independent Death Penalty Information Center. (DPIC).
