The State of Alabama executed Gregory Hunt, 65, today by nitrogen suffocation. He is the 81st person put to death in the state since 1976, despite a system that has been widely criticized and condemned.
Alabama’s death penalty has been characterized by inadequate assistance to capital defendants, wrongful convictions, racial bias, and practices like judge override that have made Alabama an outlier in death sentencing rates.
Alabama stands out among death penalty states for its failure to provide adequate counsel to people facing the death penalty at trial or on appeal. Compensation rates are too low and there’s no statewide public defender system.
Like most capital defendants, Gregory Hunt could not afford to hire a lawyer to defend him when he was charged with capital murder in the killing of Karen Lane in Jasper, Alabama, in 1988.
He was appointed counsel whose compensation was capped at $1,000 for out-of-court work for each phase in a capital trial, based on a rate of $20 per hour for no more than 50 hours of work. The cap was later removed, but nearly half of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were convicted under the compensation cap.
Mr. Hunt’s appointed counsel did not even reach the cap—according to Mr. Hunt’s federal habeas petition, his appointed counsel spent only 45 hours preparing for trial.
That is not surprising given that they were appointed less than three months before trial. With trial scheduled to start on May 14, 1990, one defense lawyer was appointed on February 21 and the other on May 1—a mere two weeks before the trial date.
Official Misconduct
While not unique to Alabama, official misconduct is a leading cause of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases.
To win a conviction in Mr. Hunt’s case, prosecutors relied on a witness who testified that Mr. Hunt confessed to him while they were both incarcerated in the Walker County Jail. According to the federal petition, the witness insisted he received no promises from the prosecution and had no expectation of receiving any benefit in exchange for his testimony, and the prosecutor repeatedly assured the jury he was going to prison for at least 15 years under Alabama’s habitual offender statute.
But less than a month after he testified against Mr. Hunt, the charges against the witness were dropped and he was released from jail and restored to probation.
Non-Unanimous Verdicts
At the time of Mr. Hunt’s trial, the unique and arbitrary practice of judge override was a significant contributor to Alabama’s high death sentencing rate. Alabama is the only state where judges have routinely overridden jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment.
The state abolished judge override in 2017, but Alabama is one of only two states that allow a person to be condemned to death without a unanimous jury vote. In nearly any other state, the State’s failure to convince all 12 Walker County jurors to impose the death penalty would have barred a death sentence for Mr. Hunt.
Mr. Hunt’s execution is the third carried out by the State of Alabama this year, following the February 6 nitrogen suffocation of Demetrius Frazier and lethal injection of James Osgood on April 24.