Final Judgment

Alabama executes a murderer

John Louis Evans was a punk, a classic posturing punk. After his release from an Indiana prison, he and a buddy he met there went on a cross-country crime spree, Jimmy Cagneys writ small in convenience stores. In Mobile, Ala., on Jan. 5, 1977, they held up a pawnshop. As the owner, Edward Nassar, crawled on the floor, his two young daughters watching in horror, Evans shot him in the back, dead.

Evans never denied the details. Indeed, he told the jurors that if they did not condemn him to death for the crime, he would return to kill them. It took them only 15 minutes to comply. During his six years on death row, Evans alternated between cockily demanding death and pleading for clemency. Finally, after a flurry of last-hour delays, including one on Thursday night, the courts granted what had once been his demented desire.

In a macabre final scene last Friday evening, televised by closed circuit to more than 30 reporters, Evans was secured in the electric chair, known as “Yellow Mama,” at the Holman prison near Atmore, Ala. Two guards pulled straps around his shaved head, attached electrodes to his scalp and leg, and left him rigid in the chair, looking small and pale.

The 1,900 volts lasted 30 seconds. Smoke and steam rose from his head. A fiery arc shot from beneath the mask that covered his face. Smoke poured from the electrode on his left leg. Through the rain outside came the mournful notes of taps being played on a trumpet by a prisoner in his cell.

But Evans was not dead. The electrode on his leg had burned through the straps and popped off. His body was motionless, but as the wires were reattached, he moved as if he were trying to draw a breath. Then came the second jolt, again for 30 seconds. Still the doctors were unsure that Evans had expired. His lawyers made a final appeal, conveyed by phone to Governor George Wallace, on the ground that the punishment had become intolerably cruel and unusual. Wallace said no. It took one more jolt, another 30 seconds, to make sure that John Evans, 33, had finally been put to death.

Evans was the sixth person to be legally killed since Gary Gilmore’s firing-squad execution in 1977 ended a ten-year hiatus in capital punishment in the U.S. More than 1,100 death-row inhabitants face similar fates. One of them is Wayne Ritter, Evans’ accomplice, who is scheduled to sit in the same chair in two weeks.