Alabama Death Row inmate Toforest Johnson’s supporters are hosting a community event on Sunday, featuring former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, to raise awareness about the decades-old case.

Johnson, 50, is on death row at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. His supporters, who include Baxley and other public figures across the state, and lawyers have long argued Johnson is innocent of the 1995 shooting of Jefferson County Deputy Sheriff William Hardy that landed him in prison.

The event is happening Sunday at Highlands United Methodist Church in Birmingham from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Baxley is a featured guest at the event.

Other guests include Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries Scott Douglas, journalist and host of an upcoming podcast on the case Beth Shelburne, Southern Center for Human Rights attorney Katherine Moss, and Johnson’s cousin Antonio Green.

Elliot Spillers, former University of Alabama SGA President who has also worked with the Equal Justice Initiative, is emceeing the event.

“Toforest Johnson has spent a quarter century on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with,” said Spillers. “We are asking people of faith from across the state and across all denominations to join in District Attorney Danny Carr’s extraordinary request for a new trial. That is the first step in returning Mr. Johnson to his family, to his children and grandchildren.”

Former Alabama Chief Justice Drayton Nabers and Baxley are among numerous lawyers, former judges and prosecutors who have submitted briefs to the circuit court or written editorials supporting a new trial for Johnson. Danny Carr, the Jefferson County District Attorney, has also called for a new trial.

Other supporters include former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, former magistrate Judge John Carroll, and two former jurors on the case.

The Sunday evening event comes on the heels of the statewide advocacy campaign, led by Greater Birmingham Ministries, to display a banner around churches across Alabama. This week, it was installed at First Presbyterian in downtown Birmingham. The banner says, “It’s not too late to fix this mistake.”

Spillers is managing the banner’s tour across the state.

Baxley, who worked to have the death penalty reinstated in Alabama, said he is usually skeptical of such innocence claims, but Johnson’s case caught his eye.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was just dumfounded that, in Alabama, a case as weak as that would have gotten to the jury, much less a death sentence,” Baxley said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Nabers wrote in an opinion piece that “there’s now substantial evidence that Mr. Johnson is innocent.”

In 2020, Carr voiced concerns about Johnson’s trials—his first trial ended in a mistrial, but Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998. Carr said his concerns included a key witness being paid a reward, as well as alibi witnesses who placed Johnson in another part of town at the time of the shooting.

In December 2022, the Alabama Supreme Court denied an appeal from Johnson’s lawyers. That appeal centered around a claim the state violated his right to a fair trial by failing to disclose that key witness was motivated by a $5,000 reward.