The 20th Execution of 2024
Alabama executed a man on October 17, 2024 who admitted to killing
five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016
and dropped his appeals and asked to be put to death, reported The Associated Press.
Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m.
Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty to the
killings that prosecutors said began when he broke into the home where his
estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.
Strapped to a gurney in the Alabama execution chamber,
Dearman spoke to the family members of the victims and to his own family in his
final statement. “Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you,” he said to
the victims’ families before adding, “I’ve taken so much.” He closed by telling
his own family, “Y’all already know I love y’all.” Some of his words were
inaudible.
The lethal injection was carried out after Dearman dropped
his appeals this year and asked that his execution go forward. “I am guilty,”
he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the
victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly
deserve.”
Dearman’s execution was one of two planned Thursday in the
U.S. Robert Roberson in Texas was scheduled to be the nation’s first person put
to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome,
in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter. The Texas Supreme Court
halted his
execution Thursday night.
Killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about
30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35;
Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea
Randall Reed, 22. Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant
when she was killed. All of the victims were related by blood or marriage.
In a statement read by the Alabama prison commissioner, a
man who lost his daughter, sister and brother in the killings, wrote there were
no words to describe the impact the murders had on him and his family. He said
Dearman got to say a final goodbye to his family, but they did not.
“I so long for a final goodbye to my daughter and I would
have loved to meet my grandchild,” Bryant Henry Randall, the father of Chelsea
Randall Reed wrote. He said his siblings did not get to see their children grow
up.
“I was stripped in many ways of happiness and the bond of
family by your senseless act,” he wrote of Dearman.
Robert Brown, the father of Robert Lee Brown, told reporters
that his family will “suffer for the rest of their lives.”
“This don’t bring nothing back,” he said. “I can’t get my
son back or any of them back.”
The execution started about 5:58 p.m., but it is unclear
when the drugs began flowing. At one point, Dearman raised his head and looked
around the chamber as if to inquire when they were starting. He soon after
appeared to lose consciousness.
His left arm moved slightly after a guard performed a
consciousness check — which involves shouting his name and pinching his arm —
to make sure he is not awake when the final lethal drugs are given. Alabama
Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said Dearman was not awake and the arm
movement was not a sign of consciousness.
When the curtains to the viewing room closed at about 6:08
p.m., his father, who was in the same viewing room as media witnesses, sobbed
and repeatedly called out his son’s name.
The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of
Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive
toward her, according to a judge’s sentencing order.
Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night
asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime
after 3 a.m., he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to a
judge’s sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the
victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home,
prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get in the car
with him and drive to Mississippi.
As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on
drugs, telling reporters that he was high on
methamphetamine when he went into the home and that the “drugs were
making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to
guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case,
Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the
state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously
recommended a death sentence.
Before he dropped his appeal, Dearman’s lawyers argued that
his trial counsel failed to do enough to demonstrate Dearman’s mental illness
and “lack of competency to plead guilty.”
The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in
the appeal, wrote on its website that Dearman “suffered from lifelong and
severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features” and
was executed “despite evidence that he suffers from serious mental illness.”
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