Despite pleadings from the victim’s family to spare his life, an Alabama prisoner who was found guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend decades ago was put to death on Thursday night.
After the United States Supreme Court rejected his plea for a stay, Joe Nathan James Jr. was given a fatal injection in a jail in south Alabama. At 9:27 p.m., more than three hours after his scheduled execution time, he was declared dead.
When compared to prior executions in Alabama, a wait of that length is unprecedented, and many found it disturbing.
The time it took to set up an intravenous line, according to the prison system in Alabama, caused the execution to be postponed, they claimed on Friday.
“The protocol states that if the veins are such that intravenous access cannot be provided, the team will perform a central line procedure. Fortunately, this was not necessary and with adequate time, intravenous access was established,” the Alabama Department of Corrections wrote in a statement emailed to The Associated Press.
The statement didn’t go into detail on how long or how many tries it took to set up the intravenous line. However, a spokesman for the jail system verified that the delay occurred as a result of the time needed to set up the IV connection.
James was found guilty and given the death penalty for the Birmingham shooting murder of 26-year-old Faith Hall in 1994. Hall’s children have stated that they would rather that James spend the rest of his life in jail, but Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced on Wednesday that she intended to carry out the execution.
According to the prosecution, James had a brief relationship with Hall, but once she rejected him, he grew infatuated and stalked and harassed her for months before killing her. According to court records, on August 15, 1994, after Hall and a friend went shopping, James broke into the friend’s apartment, took a revolver out of his belt, and shot Hall three times.
James was initially found guilty of capital murder by a Jefferson County jury in 1996, and they decided to recommend the death penalty, which the judge then handed down. When a state appeals court decided that a judge had improperly entered several police reports into evidence, the conviction was reversed. When juries dismissed the defense’s allegations that James was under emotional pressure at the time of the shooting, he was retried and again condemned to death in 1999.
Hall’s two girls, who were 3 and 6 at the time of their mother’s death, recently expressed their preference for James to be sentenced to life in prison. The family members announced on Thursday that they will not be present for the execution.
“Today is a tragic day for our family. We are having to relive the hurt that this caused us many years ago,” the statement issued through state Rep. Juandalynn Givan’s office read. Givan was a friend of Hall’s.
“We hoped the state wouldn’t take a life simply because a life was taken and we have forgiven Mr. Joe Nathan James Jr. for his atrocities toward our family … We pray that God allows us to find healing after today and that one day our criminal justice system will listen to the cries of families like ours even if it goes against what the state wishes,” the family’s statement read.
In a letter to Ivey, Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, pleaded with her to let the execution to proceed, saying that it was “our job to see that justice is done for the people of Alabama.”
“The jury in James’s case unanimously decided that his brutal murder of Faith Hall warranted a sentence of death,” Marshall said.
In response to a reporter’s question, Ivey said Wednesday that she would not intervene.
“My staff and I have researched all the records and all the facts and there’s no reason to change the procedure or modify the outcome. The execution will go forward,” she said.
The Koran and the Bible “put the principle of forgiveness essential in this case,” according to James, who claimed that Ivey’s rejection breaches laws protecting religious liberty.
James attempted to halt his execution by acting as his own counsel and submitting handwritten papers and letters of appeal to the courts from the death row. On his behalf, a lawyer Wednesday submitted the most recent appeal to the US Supreme Court. However, the stay request was turned down just before the execution was scheduled to start.
James requested a stay from the court, citing Hall’s family’s objections and claiming Alabama had not given prisoners enough notice of their ability to choose a different execution method.
James “should not be rewarded for his blatant attempt to manipulate the system,” the state claimed, because he waited too long to start attempting to have his execution delayed. It was said that while the victim’s family’s sentiments should be taken into account, a court shouldn’t postpone the execution because of them.
James contended that Alabama officials offered convicts just a small window of time to choose the new method after lawmakers approved nitrogen hypoxia as a new execution technique, and that inmates did not comprehend what was at risk when they were given a decision form without any explanation. Inmates who choose nitrogen will not be put to death in Alabama. The use of nitrogen to execute death penalties has not been established by the state.