Alabama governor sets execution date: Keith Edmund Gavin to die by lethal injection
Another Alabama Death Row inmate is set to die this summer.
Gov. Kay Ivey set July 18 as the execution date for Keith Edmund Gavin, who was sentenced to death for the March 1998 murder of William Clayton Jr. in Cherokee County.
Ivey set the timeframe for the execution of Gavin to occur beginning at midnight on Thursday, July 18, and expiring Friday, July 19.
Gavin is set to die by lethal injection at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. It’s the only prison in the state with an execution chamber and where most death row inmates are housed.
It’s the second lethal injection set for this summer. Ivey set May 30 for the execution of Jamie Ray Mills.
The executions will be carried out by the state’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail instead of the new method of nitrogen gas because neither Gavin nor Mills opted to change their methods of execution when they had the opportunity in 2018.
In Gavin’s case court records show Clayton, a courier service driver, had parked his van to use an ATM machine in downtown Centre. He was finished with deliveries for the day and was stopping at Regions Bank to get money to take his wife to dinner.
Records stated that Gavin shot Clayton during an attempted robbery, pushed him into the passenger’s seat, and drove off in the van. With an investigator from the district attorney’s office in close pursuit, Gavin stopped the van, got out, shot at the investigator, and fled.
Gavin was soon apprehended, and Clayton was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Two eyewitnesses positively identified Gavin as the shooter, including his cousin, who was an employee of the Illinois Department of Corrections. The cousin testified about trips he and Gavin had made to Centre and on that day saw Gavin fire shots at the driver of the van. Gavin also fired shots at an investigator as he fled, according to testimony.
The slaying came just a few months after Gavin had been released on parole from prison in Illinois after serving 17 years of a 34-year sentence for murder.
Following his conviction, Gavin’s appeals failed in state and federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review his case in 2005 and again in 2017.
In 2016, Gavin filed a new appeal alleging jury misconduct and ineffective counsel during the penalty phase of the trial.
In 2020, a federal judge in Birmingham upheld the state court decision denying Gavin’s jury misconduct claim. But, the judge ruled in favor of Gavin on the claim of ineffective counsel. The judge found that his original lawyers failed to pursue all the reasonably available mitigating evidence that could have influenced the decision on Gavin’s sentence. The mitigating evidence included Gavin’s upbringing in a gang-infested housing project in Chicago and the effects of his imprisonment in Illinois.
The state appealed that decision. A three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals later said Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals had reasonably determined that Gavin failed to establish that any failure by his lawyers was prejudicial. The appeals judges’ ruling reversed the previous order on ineffective counsel.
Ivey’s announcement comes after a change in the way Alabama sets execution dates. Prior to January 2023, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a death warrant, good for one 24-hour period. Now, the Alabama governor sets a time frame for the execution. The change allows the Alabama Department of Corrections more time to carry out executions, after a slew of lethal injections had to be called off because they couldn’t be completed before midnight on their respective dates.