Alabama Executes Man Who Raped, Killed 5-Year-Old
Alabama Executes Man Who Raped, Killed 5-Year-Old
The News
Alabama executed Jeremy Williams on Thursday night for the 2021 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl, less than five years after the crime.
Williams sped up his own death. He waived all of his appeals and asked the state to carry out the sentence, according to WRBL.
He was the third man put to death in the United States on Thursday. Tennessee and Oklahoma carried out executions within about 30 minutes of each other earlier in the day, CBS News reported — the first time three states have executed inmates on the same day since 2010.
Timeline
Williams kidnaps, rapes and kills a 5-year-old girl from Georgia in Phenix City, Alabama, according to WRBL and WSB-TV.
Gov. Kay Ivey sets the execution date after Williams' conviction, WSB-TV reported. Williams waives his appeals.
Tennessee and Oklahoma execute inmates within roughly half an hour of each other, per CBS News.
Alabama executes Williams at Atmore. He began his final words by thanking God for forgiving him, WRBL reported.
Reactions
The day drew sharp objections from death-penalty opponents, most of them aimed at the Tennessee case rather than Alabama's.
An attorney for Anthony Darrell Hines — convicted in the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins in Kingston Springs, Tennessee — said the state's Republican governor was forcing a "grotesque spectacle" forward by refusing to stop the execution, Raw Story reported. The lawyer called the process "outright barbaric."
Alabama's case drew no such fight from the condemned man. Williams asked the state to put him to death, WRBL reported, and dropped the appeals that normally stretch capital cases out for decades.
The Independent described three executions in one day as a scheduling coincidence, but one that reflects a broader trend of rising execution numbers in the United States.
What's Next
Alabama's case is closed with Williams' death; there is no appeal left to file.
The larger question is pace. If the trend the Independent and CBS News describe holds, states will keep setting dates at a rate the country has not seen in more than a decade — and the clustering of three in one day is likely to be repeated rather than remembered as a one-off.
More
Three same-day executions across three states had not happened since 2010, according to CBS News and the Independent. The gap between Williams' 2021 crime and his 2026 execution — under five years — is unusually short for a U.S. capital case, and it happened because he stopped fighting.
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