Robin Dion “Rocky” Myers called his lawyer a liar.

“I kind of regretted it as soon as I said it,” Myers told AL.com through the phone. “I kind of slapped myself.”

The remark came as he was stunned to learn that Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey had decided to spare his life on Feb. 28, making him the first man to have his death sentence commuted in Alabama in modern history.

Myers, 63, was set to die this spring by inhaling pure nitrogen gas at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The execution chamber where he would take his final breaths was in the same building as the cell where he’s lived for more than three decades on Alabama Death Row.

It was punishment for a crime he has long said he did not commit.

His longtime attorney, Kacey Keeton, is still processing the news, too. “It’s unreal. It really is,” she said.

For years, Keeton had fought for his life to be spared. There was no physical evidence linking Myers to the stabbing of Ludie Mae Tucker in 1991, no eyewitness testimony identifying him, nor any other solid piece of evidence to connect him to the crime. Yet a jury in Decatur found him guilty of murder in 1994.

Ivey’s decision — one condemned by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall — means Myers is set to live out his natural life in prison without the opportunity of parole. It means he will be moved off death row and likely into a state prison’s general population unit.

Days after getting the news, Myers talked with AL.com about the life he now gets a shot at living and what he would say to Ivey if he ever gets the chance.

“The support that I got was amazing,” he said. “And it kept me going and it made me strong, and it made me want to keep going.”

When asked what he would say to Ivey, the governor who has presided over nearly two dozen executions, he said he would try to show his gratitude.

“First of all, I would extend my hand to shake it, and if she would let me, I would hug her,” Myers said. “I would tell her thank you and tell her she did the right thing… . And I would ask her is there anything I could do for her.”

Life on death row

Back in 2003, Myers had an out-of-state attorney working on his appeals who missed a crucial deadline — effectively locking him out of federal court and ending his chance at overturning his conviction.

By the time Keeton, a federal public defender, took up Myers’ case in 2004, his best shot at living depended on the governor stepping in.

Over the last 31 years, Myers adjusted to living on death row. He stopped using drugs and alcohol the day he set foot in prison, he said, and quit smoking cigarettes in 2000.

He made friends with fellow death row inmates and prison staffers alike — friends he now calls family and says he will miss dearly. And he’s worked in the prison for years, working in the hall to help other inmates get ice and their food trays and more.

While Myers adjusted to living in prison, Keeton spent decades raising awareness of her client’s story while still trying legal maneuvers to get his case before a judge. She found a key witness who recanted his statements, along with experts who had questions about Myers’ mental capacity and more. But it didn’t work.

While she knew clemency was the best option, Keeton also knew it was a long shot.

“We know how unlikely it is,” she said during a phone call several days after the governor’s decision. “And not because the case is lacking or anything like that, but the reality is the numbers across the country, here in Alabama. For the last 25 (years), nothing. No matter what governor has been in office, Democrats and Republicans, and in cases that arguably deserve that space.”

Despite the odds weighing against clemency, Keeton didn’t give up. She and one of her teammates, who has been the lead investigator on Myers’ case for years, were at a professional conference in Virginia dedicated to clemency work when she got the news on Feb. 28.

Ludie Mae Tucker’s killing

In 1994, Myers was convicted in the stabbing death of Tucker, 69. She was attacked in her Decatur home in 1991, and a VCR was stolen from her living room. She and Myers knew one another, as her modest home was directly across the street from where he lived with his then-wife and four young children.

Tucker was alive when first responders got to her house that October night after the attack. She spoke with them, yet didn’t identify Myers as her attacker. According to police reports, she told an officer that her attacker was a short, stocky Black man, who was wearing a white or light-colored T-shirt with blood on it and possibly a plaid shirt overtop.

“She did not indicate that she knew the subject,” that officer would later say in court.

She died at a nearby hospital.

Tucker’s cousin was inside the house that night, too. She was stabbed during the attack and described her assailant to police, but said she wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time and couldn’t identify the man.

The first few days after the killing, police focused their investigation around a man who had supposedly traded the stolen VCR for crack cocaine. But stories quickly shifted as the people who frequented a nearby drug house started pointing the finger at each other, until the story became so tangled that one juror later said no one told a reliable tale at the trial in 1994.

Myers was, at some point, named as the one who traded the VCR by those same people. He spoke with police, telling them he had never entered Tucker’s home nor had any involvement in the crime. But, he told police that he may have pawned a VCR he found in an alley behind his home — he was addicted to crack at the time, too, and couldn’t be sure. But fingerprints on the VCR didn’t match Myers, and hairs found on Tucker’s clothes were unlikely to have come from a Black person, reports from the time showed.

It didn’t matter, though. Jurors found Myers guilty, even though several thought he was innocent. The jury recommended a sentence of life in prison without parole: Nine voted for Myers to live, while three voted for the death penalty.

Former juror Mae Puckett has spoken out about why the jury, though conflicted, voted to convict Myers. There were two or three people who wouldn’t budge on a guilty verdict, Puckett told AL.com in 2023. If the trial ended in a hung jury and Myers was tried again, a second jury might send him to the electric chair, she reasoned.

“They never ever placed him in the house that night,” Puckett told AL.com in 2023.

So, Puckett said, she and others made a deal — one that has occupied her mind for 31 years since: They would convict Myers of capital murder, but sentence him to spend his life behind bars.

At the time, Alabama had a law that allowed judges to override juries and impose a different sentence.

And that’s exactly what Morgan County Circuit Court Judge Claude Bennett McRae did when he sent Myers to death row.

Clemency for Myers

It was Friday afternoon during a session at the conference when Keeton checked her email.

“I’m so sorry,” she blurted out to the group. “I’ve got to go, I just got clemency for a client.”

The email she received was from the governor’s office, directing her to read an attachment. That attachment was the letter Ivey sent to Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm.

Myers was due for the governor to set an execution date, as the Alabama Supreme Court had authorized his execution after an ask by Marshall, Alabama’s top prosecutor. The date likely would have been set for a Thursday evening in April.

As he waited for news if he would live or die, Myers said, he didn’t want to get his family’s hopes up. He didn’t expect the governor to give him a break.

Myers said he wasn’t afraid to die. Way better people than him have been killed, Myers told AL.com on a phone call, including children who never deserved the fate they were handed. He would give his life for those people, he said, and for any of his children.

“But I don’t want to die here,” Myers said. “I don’t want to die for something I didn’t do.”

In her announcement, Ivey said she wasn’t convinced of Myers’ innocence. But, she wasn’t convinced of his guilt, either.

“I have enough questions about Mr. Myers’ guilt that I cannot move forward with executing him,” she said in a statement.

The news

Keeton ran to the lobby late that Friday afternoon, responding to the missive and thanking the governor. She frantically called her teammate, the investigator on the case who was also in the building, to meet her. They cried together.

Then, Keeton said, she called Holman prison and asked the guards to have Myers call her. She knew Myers would assume the worst.

“I always hate to call down there and ask for somebody to call, because so often it’s negative news,” Keeton said. “I’ve had to do that with Rocky before.”

Myers told AL.com that was exactly what he thought. He was terrified, “dialing and praying at the same time.” He was expecting Keeton to tell him he had gotten an execution date.

He had already begun trying to say words that could be his goodbyes earlier that week. He quit his job days earlier, as he had to move to a status that didn’t allow him to interact with other prisoners ahead of getting an execution date. Myers told some inmates he loved them, and tried to ensure that others would take care of themselves.

When he called his lawyer at the request of correctional officers, Keeton could tell he was apprehensive. She quickly shared the news that he wouldn’t be killed by the state.

“Are you lying?” Myers cried out. Keeton filmed the phone call, and shared it on social media. While they were on the phone, Myers’ oldest son called the lawyer for an update. She three-wayed the conversation and let Myers tell his son the good news.

Myers recalled the moment as one of pure joy. “All four of us was crying on the phone,” he said. “I’ve been on cloud nine ever since.”

Before he could tell his friends on death row, Myers said, they found out the news from AL.com. “Everyone was beating and banging and kicking the doors, and screaming and hollering and so happy for me,” he said. “I didn’t have to tell them nothing, they knew.”

“You took that from me,” Myers told AL.com, laughing into the phone.

Keeton said she could hear the celebration over the phone, too, with cups banging and men yelling. “That loud cacophony of sounds in that space, that is what hope sounds like.”

Myers told Keeton he planned to celebrate by calling everyone with the news. “I’m going to have some coffee and I’m going to laugh a lot,” the lawyer recalled Myers said.

The well wishes weren’t only from inmates, either. Myers said the morning after Ivey’s announcement, a prison worker entered his cell. He went to shake Myers’ hand, but quickly enveloped him in a hug. “I’m getting a lot of love,” he said.

The celebration came as Myers was being inundated with letters of support from across the world as people wrote to Ivey’s office on his behalf. “It’s overwhelming, just to know people are supporting you,” he said.

“It’s beautiful. It’s just a feeling I can’t explain…it’s like having a big extended family.”

He always heard of people milling about, living their own lives and only caring about what affects them.

But that’s not true, Myers explained softly.

He compared his situation to one of a natural disaster, where friends and strangers alike show up to pitch in and help however they can.

“It’s kind of like I was a damn disaster and everybody came to help me.”

What’s next?

Myers hasn’t spoken with the governor. But if he could, Myers said he would try to show her how grateful he is for giving him a shot at life.

Despite his battle with the courts and the long years of asking for clemency, Myers said he isn’t angry at politicians who’ve sat in the governor’s mansion. “She really thinks she’s doing the right thing” for justice and the victim, Myers said of Ivey, noting the nearly two dozen executions she has presided over.

“I don’t think she rides around in her car thinking, ‘I want to kill you.’”

And despite what’s happened to him since he moved to Alabama from his native New Jersey, Myers said for his children, he’d do it all again.

“I love Alabama. I’ve met some great people in Alabama,” he said towards the end of a second phone call. He talked about how he and Ivey are from different parts of the state — Ivey is from Wilcox County in the Black Belt, and Myers lived to the north in Morgan County — but he felt sure her hometown was beautiful.

“I never got to see that side of Alabama, but I guarantee it’s a nice place. America is a nice place. You just got to get out there and see it.”

He’s not giving up hope that one day, he will get to see it. Myers is putting all of his faith in his lawyer — who he loves “like a big sister” — to explore other legal avenues for freedom.

Keeton, for her part, is still celebrating, too. “This still feels incredibly unreal … And gratitude to Gov. Ivey and her staff, who I know spent a lot of time and prayerful consideration on a tough question. And gratitude toward people who have supported Rocky, who have written letters and made phone calls. People who have cared and prayed for him.”

Myers’ story, Keeton said, is inspiring not only to other death row inmates, but to their attorneys. Most lawyers involved in capital cases don’t often get big wins, but Myers’ clemency was a joint celebration. “There is a lightness, and I see it in other people.”

For now, Myers is still at Holman, awaiting the news of where he’ll be transported to serve his life sentence. If he could pick any prison to go to, Myers said, it would be Limestone in north Alabama. It’s the closest to his children.

He sometimes thinks about making a farewell speech when it’s time to leave the place he’s long called home, but he expects he’ll likely chicken out. It would be “so corny!” he said.

But he’ll miss the relationships he’s built for the past 31 years on Alabama Death Row.

“This is like a family to me. I hate leaving these guys.. I have friends that I love like family here. I hate to leave them. I wish they could come with me.”

“A lot of things that people think is just not me,” Myers said finally. “I’m not a threat to nobody.”

“I’m not your average normal inmate or whatever you want to call it. I’m just Rocky.”