Alabama set to execute man for fatal shooting of a delivery driver

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ATMORE, Ala. — A man convicted of fatally shooting a delivery driver during a robbery attempt in 1998 was executed Thursday evening in Alabama.

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Keith Edmund Gavin was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m. CDT following a chemical injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in southwest Alabama, authorities said. The 64-year-old inmate was convicted of capital murder in the shooting death of William Clayton Jr. in Cherokee County.

Handling his own appeals, Gavin filed a handwritten request Wednesday with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay of execution. But the nation’s high court rejected his request without comment less than an hour before the scheduled 6 p.m. CDT start of the procedure. The state attorney’s general office had responded that the inmate’s arguments that a circuit court had wrongly rejected an earlier appeal were without merit.

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Clayton, a courier service driver, had driven to an ATM in downtown Centre on the evening of March 6, 1998. He had just finished work and was getting money to take his wife to dinner, according to a court summary of trial testimony.

Prosecutors said Gavin shot Clayton during the attempted robbery, pushed him into the passenger seat of the van he was driving and drove off in the vehicle. A law enforcement officer testified that he began pursuing the van and the driver — a man he later identified as Gavin — shot at him before running away into the woods.

Clayton, 68, was retired from a job at a railroad company and was a Korean War veteran, according to a 1998 obituary published by The Birmingham News.

At the time of the killing, Gavin was on parole in Illinois after serving 17 years of a 34-year sentence for murder, according to court records.

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“There is no doubt about Gavin’s guilt or the seriousness of his crime,” the Alabama attorney general’s office had written in requesting an execution date for Gavin.

Alabama last week agreed in Gavin’s case to forgo a post-execution autopsy, which is typically performed on executed inmates in the state. Gavin, who is Muslim, said the procedure would violate his religious beliefs. Gavin had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop plans for an autopsy, and the state settled the complaint.

A jury convicted Gavin of capital murder and voted 10-2 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed. Most states now require a jury to be in unanimous agreement to impose a death sentence.

A federal judge in 2020 ruled that Gavin had ineffective counsel at his sentencing hearing because his original lawyers failed to present more mitigating evidence of Gavin’s violent and abusive childhood.

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Gavin grew up in a “gang-infested housing project in Chicago, living in overcrowded houses that were in poor condition, where he was surrounded by drug activity, crime, violence, and riots,” U.S. District Judge Karon O. Bowdre wrote.

A federal appeals court overturned the decision which allowed the death sentence to stand.

Death penalty opponents had delivered a petition Wednesday to Gov. Kay Ivey appealing to her to grant clemency to Gavin. They argued that there were questions about the fairness of Gavin’s trial and said Alabama was going against the “downward trend of executions” in most states.

It was the 10th execution in the U.S. so far this year and the third in Alabama, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Missouri also have conducted executions this year. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the state of Texas from executing an inmate 20 minutes before he was scheduled to receive a lethal injection.

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