by William Trollinger 

Charles “Sonny” Burton. Image via  Telemundo Dallas.

Maybe, just maybe, by the time you read this, Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey will have done the right thing. 

Maybe.

Let’s start with one basic and very important fact:  Sonny Burton did not kill anyone. 

On August 16, 1991 Burton and five other men robbed a Talladega, Alabama AutoZone store. After Burton had left the store, one of his accomplices – Derrick DeBruce – shot a customer, Doug Battle, who died from the wound. 

Upon appeal DeBruce’s death sentence was reduced to life without parole. The other four men involved in the robbery were not placed on Death Row. Only Sonny Burton.

The daughter of the victim, Tori Battle, has written Gov. Ivey to ask that Burton be given clemency:

It disturbs me to think of a man who is now elderly, being executed, who if he had a better lawyer, probably never would have ended up on death row . . . I hope you will consider extending grace to Mr. Burton and granting him clemency.

Six of the jurors who found Burton guilty have also written to say that they do not oppose the death sentence being commuted, and religious leaders from Islam (Burton is Muslim), Judaism, and Christianity (including the Archbishop of Mobile) have asked that Burton be granted clemency. 

But as I write this on Monday morning, March 09, Alabama’s Governor has ignored all of this, and is ready to have Sonny Burton executed on Thursday, March 12.

On the face of it this story is outrageous. But then again, this is America. And the United States is an outlier: while almost all of the nations in North and South America have either abolished or instituted a moratorium on the death penalty, the USA is – since 2008 – the only nation in the Americas to carry out executions. Add to this the fact that the abolition of capital punishment is a pre-condition for membership in the European Union, and that in Europe only Belarus continues to use the death penalty.

But Sonny Burton’s story is not just an American story. It is also a Southern story. Since 1977, the top seven states to carry out executions are all located in the South:

  1. Texas: 593 
  2. Oklahoma: 127
  3. Virginia: 113
  4. Florida: 107
  5. Missouri: 101
  6. Alabama: 79
  7. Georgia: 77

Race is crucial to understanding the Southern propensity for legal executions. As Rod Kennedy explains, perhaps the South’s 

deepest connection to violence remains the quasi-legal executions of the Lynching Era. . . . Nearly 5,000 people were lynched during the lynching era of America (1880-1940). The prevailing public attitude about lynching allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting. Daily newspapers publicized hangings and lynchings. Preachers, church choirs, good Christians, and the curious gathered to witness a lynching against the backdrop of “Shall We Gather at the River?”

While Alabama is sixth in the nation in executions since 1977, it condemns more people to death per capita (.956 per 100,000) than any other nation. Moreover, and as Sonny Burton experienced, the state (to quote the Equal Justice Initiative) suffers from “a serious crisis in the quality of counsel because the state does not pay appointed attorneys enough and has no statewide public defender system.” More than this, Alabama has the “worst record of any state for botched executions,” and is the only state that “has used nitrogen suffocation to execute a person,” despite the fact that the American Veterinary Medical Association has determined that it is “inappropriate for euthanizing animals because it causes distressing side effects.” 

Inappropriate for animals, but not for humans. And this is how Alabama plans to kill Sonny Burton.

But perhaps, in the case of Sonny Burton, region and race will prove not to be determinative. Perhaps sometime in the next three days Gov. Ivey will commute Sonny his sentence. 

And perhaps, some day, the United States of America will join much of the rest of western world, and put an end to the barbaric and capricious practice of capital punishment.

Perhaps.