The state of Alabama has executed a mentally disabled prisoner convicted of murdering a man in 1996, after a conservative majority on the Supreme Court refused to suspend implementation of the death penalty.
In the second execution in the United States in a single day, Matthew Reeves, a 43-year-old black man, died after receiving a lethal injection in Holman prison, Alabama, without saying his last words or wanting to eat anything all day.
His defense had tried to stop his execution by arguing that he suffered from an intellectual disability and that they did not give him the necessary help to decide when in 2018 he was given documents that allowed him to change the method by which the death penalty would be applied.
The lawyers argued that this deprived him of the opportunity to choose a supposedly less “torturous” method that has never been used in the United States: nitrogen hypoxia, approved in the state in 2018.
Two courts validated that request and stopped the execution, but the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which by a majority of 5 votes against 4 allowed the sentence to be applied.
Only one of the six conservative justices of the high court, Amy Coney Barrett, opposed the decision to validate the execution, as did the three progressive justices of the court.
Reeves was sentenced to death for the murder of Willie Johnson, a man who picked him up on a freeway in Selma, Alabama, in 1996 and who died of a shotgun blast to the neck after $360 was stolen.
His was the second execution so far in 2022 and also of the day in the United States: a few hours earlier, the state of Oklahoma applied the death penalty to Donald Anthony Grant, a black man convicted of murdering two hotel workers during a robbery in 2001.
Grant, 46, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was pronounced dead after receiving a lethal injection at McAlester State Penitentiary, located 100 miles south of Tulsa, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
In the last decade, public opinion in the United States has turned its back on the death penalty, convictions have plummeted and so have executions: from 98 in 1999 spread across the country to just 11 in 2021, limited to a handful of southern states like Texas, Georgia or Alabama.
Twenty-three of the 50 states have now abolished the death penalty in their territory, while another three have an active moratorium and ten more have not carried out an execution for more than a decade, according to the independent Death Penalty Information Center. (DPIC).