Sonny Burton is not a killer. No one disputes this. Yet he has spent nearly half his life on death row. At age 75, he spends most of his days in a wheelchair and wears a padded helmet because he falls frequently.
Unless Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, decides to commute Mr. Burton’s sentence, the state is set to kill him on March 12. In the near decade she has been governor, clemency is a mercy that Ms. Ivey has bestowed just once.
Here are the facts of Mr. Burton’s case: On a summer day in 1991, he accompanied Derrick DeBruce and four other men to an AutoZone store in Talladega. He carried a gun. He traumatized people. He stole recklessly. Then, Mr. Burton left the store. Mr. DeBruce stayed behind and killed a man.
Mr. DeBruce was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Mr. Burton was also convicted of murder and was sentenced under a state law that permits accomplices to receive the death penalty if a murder happens during the course of another felony, like a robbery.
After Mr. DeBruce appealed his case, the State of Alabama told the court that relief for Mr. DeBruce would lead to an “arguably unjust” result: Mr. Burton would remain on death row while the person who actually took the man’s life would receive a lesser sentence. Still, Mr. DeBruce’s death sentence was vacated and he was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
I have worked on death penalty cases for over two decades as a mitigation specialist — a member of the defense team who carries out the investigation into the background of a person accused of murder. I closely track all executions in America, and the prospect of Mr. Burton being killed is sticking in my bones. It is exceptionally rare for someone like Mr. Burton to be executed when all sides agree that he did not kill the victim. Governors of other states with similar laws have granted clemency under such conditions. Yet Mr. Burton’s execution date remains fixed.
In a state with some of the most overcrowded and deadly prisons in the country, Mr. Burton’s case provides an opportunity for a different kind of justice to prevail. In choosing mercy for Mr. Burton, Governor Ivey would not just be extending grace to a man who deserves it; she would be challenging a culture of indifference that has allowed Alabama’s prison system to grow too comfortable with its own inhumanity.
Several jurors from Mr. Burton’s trial have said that they do not want him to be killed. Tori Battle, the daughter of Doug Battle — the man who was killed at the AutoZone — also doesn’t want the state to kill in her father’s name. In an essay published in December, Ms. Battle wrote that her opposition to Mr. Burton’s execution embodies the values her father lived by. “Justice can be measured by our commitment to truth and our willingness to show mercy,” she wrote.
If Ms. Ivey doesn’t intervene, Mr. Burton will be lifted onto a gurney where officers will affix a mask to his face and suffocate him with lethal nitrogen gas. It is a method of killing that the American Veterinary Medical Association has declared inappropriate for euthanizing most animals. If his execution goes the way previous nitrogen executions have gone, he will writhe on the gurney for minutes before losing consciousness.
Although a handful of states allow for nitrogen gas to be used in executions, Alabama was the first to try it when it killed Kenneth Eugene Smith in 2024. That was after Mr. Smith survived an attempted lethal injection of drugs in 2022, when executioners repeatedly punctured his arms and chest with needles, unable to establish intravenous lines; in all, Mr. Smith spent four hours strapped to a gurney waiting to die.
If Mr. Burton’s execution proceeds, he will be yet another casualty of the indifference pervasive throughout Alabama’s legal system. In 2019, the Justice Department released a report detailing rampant and unchecked violence in the state’s prisons. Page after page contained accounts of prisoners who were tortured, raped, burned, sodomized, stabbed and killed in mostly unsupervised dorms. Instead of using this report as an impetus for change, Alabama seems to have largely accepted the status quo. Prisons remain understaffed and overcrowded. Well over 1,000 people have died inside the state’s prisons since the report came out. Recently, I sat with a client who is incarcerated in the maximum-security prison in Bessemer. He scanned the room nervously as he recounted the stabbings he had witnessed since I had seen him months earlier.
Justice includes mercy. It must. What we allow for one person, regardless of the individual’s circumstance, we permit for all people. Indifference cannot be allowed to prevail. With Sonny Burton’s case, Alabama has a chance to pivot toward a more humane form of justice. In a state that rarely shows mercy to those behind bars, here is an opening. Let us hope Governor Ivey will take it.
Elizabeth Vartkessian is the executive director of Advancing Real Change, a nonprofit that conducts mitigation investigations in criminal cases. She also is the author of “The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post He Didn’t Kill Anyone. Alabama Is About to Execute Him Anyway. appeared first on New York Times.
