Witnesses — Alabama Prisoner Still Moving 20 Minutes Into Execution With Controversial Drug

Alabama executed Torrey McNabb (pictured) on October 19, amid questions of state interference in the judicial process, resulting in another apparent failure by the drug midazolam to render a prisoner insensate during an execution. Alabama prison officials defended the execution—which took 35 minutes—as conforming with state protocol, most of which has been withheld from the public. Montgomery Advertiser execution witness Brian Lyman reported that at 9:17 p.m., twenty minutes into the execution and after two consciousness checks, “McNabb raised his right arm and rolled his head in a grimace” and then fell “back on the gurney.” Associated Press reported that his “family members and attorneys who witnessed the execution expressed repeated concerns to each other that he was still conscious during the lethal injection.”

Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn dismissed McNabb’s responses as “[i]nvoluntary movement,” which he said were not unusual. “I’m confident he was more than unconscious at that point,” he said.

McNabb had been challenging the state’s execution protocol in court for more than a year at the time Alabama issued a warrant for his execution. He had won an appeal permitting his case against the state’s use of midazolam to move forward to trial, and the Alabama federal courts had issued an injunction stopping the execution so that judicial review of the state’s execution process could take place. However, on October 19, the U.S. Supreme Court, over the dissents of Justices Breyer and Sotomayor, lifted the injunction, vacating the stay and permitting the execution to proceed. Two-and-a-half hours after the execution was scheduled to begin, the Supreme Court denied another last-minute stay application, without dissent, and the execution proceeded.

The execution capped a dramatic 48 hours during which Texas courts halted two other executions that had been scheduled for October. On October 18, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had stayed Clinton Young’s October 26 execution to permit an evidentiary hearing on his challenge that newly discovered gunshot residue evidence showed that the state’s lead witness was the actual killer in his case, and a Texas trial court had stayed the execution of Anthony Shore to investigate allegations that he may have colluded with another death-row prisoner to falsely confess to the murder for which that prisoner had been condemned. McNabb’s execution was Alabama’s third and the 21st in the United States in 2017.