| Advertisement |
Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Alabama executed death row prisoner Matthew Reeves on Thursday night for the 1996 slaying of Willie Johnson in Selma after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction from a lower court. The state had asked for the high court to intervene Wednesday night after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's order barring the execution of Matthew Reeves.
Advertisement
Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted she would deny the state's petition, while Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Stephen Breyer dissented in the case.
"Four judges on two courts have decided -- after extensive record development, briefing and argument -- that Matthew Reeves's execution should not proceed as scheduled tonight," Kagan wrote. "The law demands that we give their conclusions deference ... But the Court today disregards the well-supported findings made below, consigning Reeves to a method of execution he would not have chosen if properly."
The lower courts ruled that corrections officials didn't properly accommodate Reeves' intellectual disability when having him choose his preferred method of dying -- nitrogen hypoxia or another method -- within a 30-day period.
His lawyers said he was scheduled for execution because he didn't elect the new method of execution -- nitrogen hypoxia. They said, though, that he couldn't make the decision on the corrections department's form without additional help because of his intellectual disability.
The state, in its petition to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, said Reeves was unlikely to win the case and therefore the injunction should be lifted.
The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based non-profit that seeks to end excessive punishment in the United States, said evidence of Reeves' intellectual disability was never presented to the jury during his murder trial. He failed first, fourth and fifth grades, never advanced beyond middle school and has an IQ of 71, with a third-grade reading level.
"Notably, this is not a case where a defendant has asked a district court to enjoin a state from executing him altogether, regardless of the method of execution," the appellate court wrote. "Mr. Reeves requested only that the court prevent the [Alabama Department of Corrections] from executing him by any method other than the one he would have chosen but for the defendants' alleged violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act], pending the resolution of his ADA claim."
The EJI also takes issue with the fact that two jurors voted against a death sentence for Reeves. Alabama is the only state in which a defendant can be sentenced to death on a non-unanimous verdict.
Reeves and his fellow defendants planned to commit a robbery in 1996, but when their car broke down, Johnson, a passing driver, stopped to assist them. They then decided to rob Johnson and Reeves fatally shot him.
