John Louis Evans III (January 4, 1950 – April 22, 1983) was the first inmate to be executed by the State of Alabama after the United States reinstituted the death penalty in 1976. The torturous manner of his execution is frequently cited by opponents of capital punishment in the United States. Evans was born in Beaumont, Texas and died in Atmore, Alabama at the age of 33.
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After his 1976 parole from an Indiana prison, Evans and fellow convict Wayne Ritter embarked on a two-month long crime spree involving, by Evans's own admission, over thirty armed robberies, nine kidnappings, and two extortion schemes across seven states. On January 5, 1977 he and Ritter robbed and killed Edward Nassar, a pawn shop owner in Mobile, Alabama while his two young daughters were in the store. The perpetrators fled, but were captured on March 7 by FBI agents in Little Rock, Arkansas. Among the evidence recovered was the gun used to shoot Nassar in the back, and another gun stolen from the pawn shop.
Although he gave a detailed confession, prosecutors refused to accept his plea of guilty because they wanted Evans sentenced to death, and under Alabama law, this is only allowed following a conviction by a jury. Evans was tried in State Circuit Court in Mobile, Alabama on April 26, 1977 for first-degree murder committed during commission of a robbery. During the trial, Evans again admitted to his crime and stated that he did not feel remorse and that under the same circumstances he would kill again. Furthermore, he threatened that if the jury did not sentence him to death, he would escape and murder each of them. Despite his testimony, the jury was instructed to consider all the evidence and to return a verdict of guilty only if the prosecutors had left no reasonable doubt. The jury convicted Evans of the capital offense charged, thus imposing the death penalty, after less than fifteen minutes of deliberation.
Under Alabama law, all capital sentences must by affirmed by review in higher court. The sentence of death was confirmed by the Alabama Court of Appeals and by the Alabama Supreme Court, which set the date of April 6, 1979 for his execution.
On April 2, Evans's mother Betty, acting as "next friend", petitioned the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama for a Writ of Habeas Corpus. The application requested the Court to find Evans's conviction to be unconstitutional because consideration of lesser included offenses was not offered the jury. The District Court dismissed her application on the grounds that she was not entitled to act as "next friend". She appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which overturned the District Court's decision and, in fact, judged the initial criminal conviction to be invalid. In 1982, the United States Supreme Court granted the State's petition for a Writ of Certiorari, reversing the judgment of the Court of Appeals and returning to them the decision on the constitutionality of his sentence.
This finding was made with two of the justices (William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall) entering an opinion "concurring in part and dissenting in part," because they accepted the argument of the State of Alabama on the matter in question, but held that capital punishment itself was "cruel and unusual punishment", prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
In July of that year, Evans fired his lawyers and filed a motion to dismiss all further appeals. The Court of Appeals accepted his motion on October 19, 1982. A subsequent application for a new sentencing hearing was rejected by the Alabama Supreme Court on February 18, 1983 and execution was carried out at Holman Prison, near Atmore, Alabama on April 22.
The execution is notable for its imprecision. The means of carrying out the sentence of death used at Holman Prison was an electric chair constructed by an inmate in 1927. The chair was nicknamed "Yellow Mama" because of its traffic-yellow coat of paint. It had not been used since 1965, after which a series of Supreme Court decisions created an effective moratorium on executions in the United States until the constitutionality of the death penalty was affirmed by the Court in Gregg v. Georgia (1976).
The execution was witnessed by reporter Mark Harris, who wrote this first-person account for United Press International Wed., May 4, 1983.
The following description of Evans's electrocution was sworn by Evans' attorney, Russell F. Canan on June 22, 1983:
Shortly before his execution, Evans was featured in an After School Special called "Dead Wrong" in which he shared his life story with young people and pleaded for them not to make the mistakes he did that led to the electric chair. The program makes no reference to the multiple charges required to end Evan's life.
Evans's accomplice, Wayne Ritter, was electrocuted on August 28, 1987.
| Preceded by Charlie Brooks, Jr. |
People executed in US | Succeeded by Jimmy Lee Gray |