18 October 2024 :
Oct. 17, 2024 - Alabama. Alabama executed a man Thursday 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.
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.”
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.
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 Laneta Lester, 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.”
Dearman becomes the 5th executed this year in Alabama, the 77th since Alabama resumed executions in 1983, the 20th this year in the U.S., and No. 1602 since the U.S. resumed executions in 1977.
Alabama executes man who killed 5 and asked to be put to death (kfyrtv.com)
