(Montgomery) On Wednesday, as she does every time there is an execution the next day, Esther Brown, 91, drove an hour and a half to the capital to deliver a petition to the governor of Alabama.
And as usual, Kay Ivey didn’t get it.
” Hello Mrs Brown,” said Pam Bye, a staffer for the governor, upon receiving the latest petition.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Pam Bye receives another 30,000-name petition against the death penalty from Esther Brown on behalf of the governor of Alabama, as she does every time there is an execution.
This Thursday, the execution of Alan Miller, 59, who killed two co-workers and a plumbing equipment company boss 25 years ago, will take place. Despite well-documented mental illness, including his delusional and “dissociative” state at the time of the crimes, his lawyer withdrew his insanity defense. The lawyer even told the jury he was “not proud to represent someone who, according to fairly convincing evidence, did what he did.” Twenty minutes later, he was found guilty.
Two of the 12 jurors recommended life in prison, 10 recommended death. In all states with the death penalty, a unanimous jury recommendation is required – except in Alabama and Florida.
A first execution by injection was attempted, but despite all the efforts of the executioners, including turning the body of the condemned man upside down, the vein was not found. This time, it will be by suffocation with nitrogen.
“We are a cruel people,” Esther Brown, who has led the Project to Abolish the Death Penalty for 24 years, tells me.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Esther Brown married the man she saved from execution by investigating to prove his innocence.
I hate to say it, but Alabama is a backward state. It’s not even the United States. They go to church on Sunday and kill in their spare time. Not all of them, but still. Our governor says all life is sacred, but she executes people with mental illness.
Esther Brown
Esther learned the spirit of contradiction at a young age in Nazi Germany. Her uncle Henning von Tresckow was executed for plotting against Hitler. Her family was decimated. When she emigrated to England after the war, she was considered the enemy. After raising three children and being separated, she went to volunteer at a federal penitentiary in Florida for a Christmas party. She fell in love with a man named Willie Brown, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow inmate.
She impromptuly acted as an investigator and obtained a confession from a key witness at Brown’s trial. He admitted to perjury.
“It took me four years. The state dropped the charges, and the day he got out of prison, we got married. We had a great time…”
After this feat, the name of the little woman who could not be stopped by anything circulated, and she found herself, somewhat in spite of herself, campaigning against the death penalty.
“I knew nothing about law and had no interest in these issues before that Christmas party at the penitentiary,” she said.
She attended two executions. A “hellish” experience.
“I am not an optimist. Those I worked with knew that it would not be abolished in their lifetime. I do it to give meaning to their lives and mine. I send them Discovering meaning in lifeby Viktor Frankl. We can hope for smaller things. That a person feels a little better. That people evolve through organization.
“There are innocent people, but it is not relevant to our struggle. For me, it remains incomprehensible to kill these people who had a horrible childhood and have a mental illness. The state that kills them, where was it to protect them, to care for them? Only one Western country does that. I like the French word terminal… »
Among the small group heading to the Capitol in Montgomery at noon Wednesday was Charles Keith, who came from Ohio to protest. His brother Kevin Keith’s case gained notoriety after Kim Kardashian launched a podcast about him.
Eleven days before his execution, the governor of Ohio commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, thanks to the efforts of Charles, who investigated the case.
Kevin has always denied being the perpetrator of the 1994 shooting that killed three people, including two children. The evidence rested largely on a description of a “large black man.” His brother amassed enough evidence to avoid execution, but not enough to exonerate him.
“It was an all-white jury, nothing new there. I had never witnessed such a judicial lynching. It was like Mississippi Burning Or A Time to Killbut there I was in the movie, and I still am. I’m an activist in a group, we help poor people understand the system and ask good questions of lawyers,” Keith says.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Charles Keith came to protest in front of the Alabama capitol. He got his brother off death row in Ohio.
One day the death penalty will be abolished, but like slavery, it will take a lot of horrible things before people are sufficiently disgusted by it. We should not become murderers by killing the killers.
Charles Keith
He climbs the steps of the Southern state capitol, where the name of secessionist and slave-owning president Jefferson Davis is engraved on a gold star. He is stunned.
“This is where the civil rights movement was born, Martin Luther King marched from Selma to here in 1965… But black people on death row are losing their appeals here. Note that the activists are white…
– For what ?
— At least they won’t be shot at…
On December 22, 1986, at age 24, Sue Zann Bosler watched her father get stabbed to death in their Florida home. She was left for dead and miraculously survived.
“I told the prosecutor, ‘I’m against the death penalty.’ He told me, ‘You can testify, say what you do, but not give your opinion.'”
Despite threats of imprisonment if she pleaded for the survival of the killer, James Bernard Campbell, she got her message across. The man was sentenced to life in prison.
“I prevented one death, I’m trying to prevent others,” said the 62-year-old hairdresser. “If I had helped the government execute him, I would be a murderer too. I said I had forgiven. I only felt it for real five years later. That doesn’t take away my right to mourn my father, but I do it without rage.”
“The death penalty is not fair because it targets not the worst of the worst, but the poorest of the poor,” says local pastor Lynn Hopkins, who has worked with death row inmates.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Pastor Lynn Hopkins has accompanied people on death row.
“I am simply a presence. I do not give hope, well it depends on what you mean by hope. I do not make people believe that a happy event is going to happen. But I try to create a moment of connection. A moment can be wonderful. There can be love.”
A link with Quebec
The group is calling for the abolition of the death penalty, but in the meantime it is advocating for a ban on the new method pioneered by Alabama: suffocation with nitrogen. Miller will be the second to die this way.
A demonstration took place in Connecticut in front of the manufacturer of suffocation masks.
Allegro Industries, it should be noted, is a subsidiary of Walter Surface Technologies (WST), a company owned by Canadian interests.
More precisely, WST is located in Pointe-Claire, Quebec.
Judge Alabama as you wish, but a local company is linked to an execution technique denounced as particularly cruel by Amnesty International.
Because the death penalty was abolished in Canada, but not the profits from the death penalty in Alabama…