The Last Alabama Execution by Electric Chair was 20 Years Ago Today.

 

     It was on May 10, 2002 that Lynda Lyon Block, a white woman, was executed in "Yellow Mama", the Alabama Electric Chair, the last Alabama inmate to be electrocuted.

The state has executed 32 people since then, all by lethal injection.

The State's death penalty law allows the inmate to choose between the two forms of execution, but none has selected the chair.

229 people were executed by hanging between 1812 and 1860. Almost all were black or Native American men, 12 were black women.

One man---a white soldier---was executed by shooting in 1814.

In 1835 the state executed by hanging a white man named Charles Boyington, who was described as working as a "printer/poet". He insisted he was innocent of the murder of a friend in a Mobile cemetery.

From The Death Penalty Information website:

"Until 2017, Alabama allowed the practice of judicial override, in which judges could override a jury’s sentencing recommendation even when the jury had recommended a life sentence. Alabama still allows a judge to impose a death sentence without a unanimous jury recommendation for death if at least 10 of 12 jurors recommend a death sentence."

There are 166 inmates on Alabama's death row.

CBS 42 in Birmingham filed a report in which two former Alabama Governors expressed doubts:

Democrat Don Siegelman and Republican Robert Bentley both said they now have significant reservations about the death penalty. Siegelman, who served as governor from 1995 to 1999, and Bentley, who served from 2011 to 2017, each denied clemency to eight death-row prisoners executed during their tenures. Both unsuccessfully urged Governor Kay Ivey to commute Smith’s death sentence based on evidence that he was intellectually disabled. “If I knew then what I know now,” says Siegelman, “[the prisoners] wouldn’t [have been] executed.”