On the day<\/span> after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commuted his death sentence, halting his execution two days before he was supposed to die, Charles \u201cSonny\u201d Burton sat in his wheelchair in a visiting room at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., drinking a Coke and eating a Reese\u2019s peanut butter cup.<\/p>\n He could not stop smiling.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m feeling wonderful,\u201d Burton told me.<\/p>\n Burton, 75, wore white sneakers and a brace on his right hand, his tan quilted jacket and slacks fitting loosely over his thin frame. A tan helmet, given to him by the prison to protect from his occasional falls, sat on the table next to an array of photos taken with family earlier that day, along with a bag of quarters for the vending machines.<\/p>\n Burton identified the people in one of the photos for me. Several were still in the visiting room: his sister Eddie Mae Ellison, his son Charles Burton III, and his grandson Charles Burton IV. No sooner had one group of relatives left the visiting room than another showed up \u2014 a rolling family reunion.<\/p>\n Burton had been sitting in that same visiting room with his lawyers 24 hours earlier, on Tuesday, March 10, when his longtime paralegal Nancy Palombi got a phone call in Montgomery, 120 miles away. While the rest of the legal team was at the prison without access to their cellphones, Palombi had stayed behind to field any communications from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just received their final filings aimed at stopping Burton\u2019s execution.<\/p>\n Instead, she got a call from a reporter she knew. The reporter was screaming, \u201cHave you heard?\u201d The governor\u2019s office had just sent out a press release with the subject line, \u201cUpdate from Governor Kay Ivey: Charles L. Burton.\u201d And that\u2019s how Palombi learned that her client of 20 years would not be executed.<\/p>\n \u201cI was the first member of the team to find out,\u201d Palombi told me that morning, her voice still trembling with a mix of shock, joy, and relief.<\/p>\n Palombi called the prison and spoke to the warden\u2019s secretary, who entered the visitation room with a smile on her face. She told Burton\u2019s lead attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matt Schulz, that he should call his paralegal right away. \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh my god, it happened,\u2019\u201d Schulz said. \u201cBut I still didn\u2019t want to let myself believe it, because I didn\u2019t know yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Schulz rushed to his car, drove out of range from Holman\u2019s cellphone blockers, and called Palombi. He then sped back.<\/p>\n Describing the scene the next day, Burton turned and pointed toward the hallway that runs along the perimeter of the visiting room. That\u2019s where prison staff celebrated as the news spread on death row. Nurses and officers waved and gave him thumbs ups through the horizontal window slats. \u201cGuards were saying, \u2018Sonny got clemency! Sonny got clemency!\u2019\u201d Burton said.<\/p>\n A day later, everyone was still a bit shellshocked. Burton\u2019s son, who had flown in from New York, got the news while loading up his rental car for the drive to Atmore. Burton\u2019s sister was at the doctor\u2019s office in Montgomery, where she saw a local news alert. She ran outside and dropped to her knees. \u201cAnd then the tears just flowed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n For decades, the visiting room had been the site of agonizing goodbyes between the condemned and their loved ones in the hours before an execution. Now it was home to warm hugs and tranquil smiles, no one\u2019s bigger than Burton\u2019s. He invoked the famed blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor: \u201cI\u2019m too cool to move.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Burton\u2019s commutation was<\/span> historic: the third time in the modern history of Alabama\u2019s death penalty that a person facing execution received clemency by the governor. Ivey, a staunch Republican, has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017. Although she commuted the sentence of Burton\u2019s neighbor, Rocky Myers<\/a>, last year due to serious doubts over his guilt, few were optimistic that she would exercise such mercy again.<\/p>\n Burton would have been the ninth person executed using nitrogen gas<\/a> in Alabama in just over two years. The method was adopted following complications carrying out lethal injection, a wider trend that has reshaped the landscape of executions<\/a> across the country. The state\u2019s last execution prompted a forceful dissent<\/a> from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the psychological torture in visceral detail. \u201cYou want to breathe; you have to breathe,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBut you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n Burton\u2019s commutation also came as a searing documentary about the state prison system, \u201cThe Alabama Solution,\u201d was in the race to win an Oscar. The film, which was produced using footage from contraband cellphones<\/a>, forced politicians to acknowledge the deadly conditions and inhumane punishments inflicted on people incarcerated in their state. On the day I visited Burton, lawmakers met in Montgomery<\/a> to discuss legislation to impose oversight on Alabama\u2019s prisons.<\/p>\n It was this kind of public pressure that undoubtedly saved Burton\u2019s life. \u201cI would have 100 percent died without it,\u201d Burton told me. In Montgomery, activists held vigils every Monday for weeks in front of the governor\u2019s mansion, while downtown businesses posted flyers about Burton\u2019s case in their front windows. On the eve of Ivey\u2019s decision, two of Burton\u2019s daughters led a march to the state Capitol to deliver petitions to her office.<\/p>\n The campaign for clemency<\/a> was launched by Burton\u2019s legal team, who believed they had nothing to lose. They highlighted Burton\u2019s remorse, his advanced age and poor health, and, above all, his lack of culpability for the murder that sent him to death row. \u201cThis is one of those cases that shocks people,\u201d Schulz said in a clemency film<\/a> produced last year. \u201cAnd it shocks people in a totally different way than most death penalty cases.\u201d<\/p>\n Burton was 40<\/span> years old when he led a group of younger men in an armed robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama. A 34-year-old father and military veteran named Doug Battle walked in as the crime was underway \u2014 and one of the young men fatally shot him in the back.<\/p>\n At first, Burton denied any role in either the robbery or the shooting. His apparent lack of remorse helped convince jurors at his 1992 trial that he should be punished as severely as the man who actually shot Battle, a 20-year-old named Derrick DeBruce, who had already been sent to death row. After a four-day trial, Burton, too, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to die.<\/p>\n But a federal court eventually threw out<\/a> DeBruce\u2019s death sentence, finding that his lawyer failed to effectively represent him during the punishment phase of his trial. The Alabama attorney general\u2019s office initially appealed the decision, contending that it would be \u201carguably unjust\u201d to allow Burton to be executed for his co-defendant\u2019s actions. But in 2015, the state agreed to reduce DeBruce\u2019s punishment to life without parole. He died five years later.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The notion that Burton should now pay with his life for another man\u2019s crime spurred outrage among people in Alabama and beyond. The campaign to save Burton was bolstered by six of the eight living jurors who voted to send him to death row, as well as by Battle\u2019s daughter, Tori Battle, who was outspoken<\/a> in her opposition to the execution. \u201cWhat is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?\u201d she asked Ivey in a letter that was submitted as part of Burton\u2019s 88-page clemency petition<\/a>. \u201cIs it for my father? For me? To deter crime? I honestly do not understand.\u201d<\/p>\n The petition argued, first and foremost, that Burton never killed anyone. \u201cHe did not pull the trigger that killed Douglas Battle,\u201d his lawyers wrote. In fact, he didn\u2019t even witness the murder. \u201cMr. Burton was already outside of the AutoZone building where the shooting took place.\u201d Although Alabama\u2019s felony murder statute allows defendants to be held responsible for the actions of others, Burton was only supposed to be eligible for capital murder if he intended to take somebody\u2019s life \u2014 and there was nothing to prove that this was the case.<\/p>\n The state\u2019s star witness against Burton was a teenager named LuJuan McCants who agreed to testify in order to avoid the death penalty. He said that Burton had gathered the group with the intention of committing a robbery \u2014 and if something went wrong, \u201che said let him take care of it.\u201d According to prosecutors, this directive proved that Burton intended to kill anyone who might stand in the way of the robbery. But even this weak evidence was undermined by McCants\u2019s own testimony, as well as by an interrogation video discovered by Burton\u2019s lawyers years after the trial. It showed McCants repeatedly telling investigators that Burton had not wanted anyone to get hurt \u2014 and that he\u2019d been upset upon learning that DeBruce shot Battle.<\/p>\n Some of the jurors who spoke out against the execution said they were haunted by their decision. \u201cI have questioned whether death is an appropriate punishment,\u201d one woman wrote in a letter submitted with the clemency petition. \u201cI have often thought about Mr. Burton\u2019s mother, who was no doubt devastated by the sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n But for most, it came down to the obvious unfairness of executing Burton for DeBruce\u2019s crime. \u201cHad I known the shooter would later be taken off death row,\u201d one juror wrote, \u201cI would not have voted for the death sentence.\u201d Another juror wrote that Burton may have been the ringleader, \u201cbut if Charles Manson can get a life sentence for leading his group to kill many people, it is fair for Mr. Burton to serve life without parole.\u201d<\/p>\n Like most people<\/span> living on death row, Burton bears no resemblance to Charles Manson \u2014 or to the people Americans picture when they hear the term \u201cworst of the worst.\u201d His early life had many of the familiar hallmarks of those who are put to death in the United States: poverty, racism<\/a>, childhood abuse, and trauma<\/a>. By the time Alabama came close to executing him, he\u2019d long since apologized for his actions and was in frequent pain from rheumatoid arthritis, unable to walk on his own.<\/p>\n But he was also lucky, he told me. If there was anything that sustained him during his years at Holman, it was a strong family structure, which many of his neighbors lack. Indeed, Burton\u2019s clemency petition was filled with letters from relatives, pen pals, and advocates who described Burton as a positive and nurturing presence in their lives.<\/p>\n I was supposed to attend Burton\u2019s execution \u2014 not as a media witness, but as one of the people placed on his personal list. Burton did not wish for his family to be subjected to his death, and his legal team decided that, should the killing move forward, they wanted the world to know what Alabama had done. They invited me and two other journalists to join them in the witness room.<\/p>\n One of them, Lee Hedgepeth, had already witnessed seven executions in Alabama, including three by nitrogen gas. The last one had been the longest to date, lasting 40 minutes<\/a>. Schulz had seen two of his clients killed with nitrogen. Their accounts were harrowing: Terror and panic was visible on the faces of the condemned, who gasped and\u00a0thrashed on the gurney. As Burton\u2019s execution date neared, Schulz wondered how it would compare. Would his elderly client suffer more or less due to his age and poor health? Could his more shallow breathing cause the execution to last longer? Or would the fact that he does not have as much oxygen in his lungs to begin with mean it would be shorter?<\/p>\n What was certain was that executing Burton would have been a horrifying spectacle. Guards would have had to lift him onto the gurney, adjusting the thick black straps to fit more tightly over his withered body, and putting a mask over his face. Witnesses would then have watched as Alabama suffocated an elderly man, who killed no one, in the name of justice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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