Death row inmate made haunting final hand symbol before being executed for killing a woman
Gregory Hunt, 65, was pronounced dead at 6:26 p.m. on Tuesday at a south Alabama prison, authorities said, one of four scheduled this week in the United States.
Hunt was convicted of capital murder for the killing of Karen Lane, who was 32 when she was killed on Aug. 2, 1988, in the Cordova apartment she shared with another woman in Walker County.
Strapped to a gurney with a blue-rimmed mask covering his entire face, Hunt gave no final words but appeared to give a thumbs-up sign and a peace sign with his fingers.
The gas began flowing sometime after 5:55 p.m., but it was not clear exactly when.
At 5:57 p.m. Hunt briefly shook, gasped and raised his head off the gurney. He let out a moan at about 5:59 p.m. and raised his feet.
He took a series of four or more gasping breaths with long pauses in between, and made no visible movements after 6:05 p.m.
The shaking movements and gasps were similar to previous nitrogen executions in Alabama.
The execution method involves forcing an inmate to breathe pure nitrogen gas, depriving them of the oxygen needed to stay alive.
The state says the movements are expected, but critics say they show that the execution method does not provide a quick death.
'What I saw has been consistent with all the other nitrogen hypoxia executions. There is involuntary body movement,' Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said.
Hunt had dated Lane for about a month. Prosecutors said that after becoming enraged with jealousy, he broke into Lane's apartment and sexually abused her and beat her to death, inflicting 60 injuries on her body.
Jurors convicted him in 1990 and recommended a death sentence by an 11-1 vote.
Several of Lane's relatives witnessed the execution, Hamm said.
The family said in a statement that the night was not about Hunt's life but rather the 'horrific death of Karen Sanders Lane, whose life was so savagely taken from her.' They added that Hunt showed her no mercy in 1988.
'This is also not about closure or victory. This night represents justice and the end of a nightmare that has coursed through our family for 37 years,' the family said.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall called the execution 'a long-overdue moment of justice.'
'Karen was a young woman whose life was stolen in the most brutal and dehumanizing way imaginable,' Marshall said, adding, 'Gregory Hunt spent more time on death row than Karen spent alive.'
Hunt was among the longest-serving inmates on Alabama's death row.
He told The Associated Press last month that finding religion in prison helped him get 'free of my poisons and demons' and that he tried to help other inmates. He led a weekly Bible class since 1998, he said.
'Just trying to be a light in a dark place, trying to tell people if I can change, they can too ... become people of love instead of hate,' he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Hunt's request for a stay about three hours before the execution began. Hunt argued that prosecutors misled jurors about the evidence of sexual abuse, a claim the Alabama attorney general's office called meritless.
Hunt declined to have a dinner meal. On the day of his execution, he had a lunch tray that included bologna, black-eyed peas, carrots and fruit punch, prison officials said.
The Rev. Jeff Hood, a death penalty opponent who worked with Hunt, expressed sadness over his execution.
'Greg Hunt was my friend. I am devastated that Alabama saw fit to kill him,' Hood said.
Last year Alabama became the first state to carry out an execution with nitrogen gas. The method has now been used in six executions — five in Alabama and one in Louisiana.
Hunt selected nitrogen over the other options, lethal injection or the electric chair, before Alabama developed procedures for the method.
Hunt's was o ne of two executions carried out Tuesday in the country. In Florida, Anthony Wainwright, 54, died by lethal injection for the April 1994 killing of 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart, a nursing student and mother of two young children, in Lake City.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
4 minutes ago
- The Independent
Cops search for man accused of killing cancer patient's dog as revenge for a fight between two animals the same day
Tennessee authorities are looking for a man suspected of dragging an elderly woman's dog out of her trailer and shooting it dead, just hours after the dog got into a fight with another animal. Detectives have issued an arrest warrant for Gavin Palpallatoc after he allegedly barged into the home of a terminally ill, 78-year-old woman at the Redwood Estates mobile home park, in Memphis, on Friday. The 31-year-old is now wanted for aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, aggravated cruelty to animals and aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult, according to a release from Memphis police. Palpallatoc was allegedly instructed to kill the dog by his friend Jane Reynolds, 52, who has also been charged with aggravated cruelty to animals. According to Memphis police, Reynolds said two animals had gotten into a small fight earlier that day in the elderly woman's backyard. The owner of the deceased dog wished to remain anonymous but said Reynolds called her after the fight and told her "I'm gonna call my friend to come put that dog down." She also showed officers text messages between her and Reynolds, who had told her "I can't stop whatever is going to happen. I'm sorry." Later on, Palpallatoc entered her home and took her dog, a Pit Bull mix named Cash. "We were sitting on the couch just watching TV, and this guy comes in and pulls him from my couch to the floor, to the porch," the woman said, adding that she had heard at least 12 gunshots, before Palpallatoc fled the scene. "He emptied the clip," she told police. "Something has got to be missing somewhere for him to come and kill that dog." A witness told police that she heard the gunfire and saw suspect Palpallatoc walking towards Reynolds with a gun by his side. He later drove from the scene in a green Honda CRV. According to WREG, the dog's owner is battling terminal cancer and adopted Cash – a stray – five years ago, after he wandered into the mobile home park. "We got a good dog," she told the outlet. "He was my life. "I was trying to rehome him and anything I could do and keep him with me as long as I could, and I had really been suffering over that and the fact that what if I go before he goes, what's going to happen."
The Guardian
5 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Death always feels imminent': a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness
In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James 'JJ'88' Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to 'the hole' – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him. In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He'd make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest. A talented singer and rapper, he began to compose songs on notebook paper, along with treatments for imagined music videos. His lyrics that grappled with healing and reckoning – how to maintain self-worth in the face of devastating interpersonal and systemic violence, how to reconcile the worst thing you've ever done with your dignity as a human being. The prison kept Jacobs in the hole for 2.5 months – far longer than the 15 days the United Nations recognizes as torture. 'Being in here, death always feels imminent,' Jacobs says in a recorded prison phone call at the beginning of the remarkable new documentary Songs from the Hole. 'I have to manufacture hope. And the way I manufacture hope is by writing music.' Jacobs eventually managed to record rough demos of his tracks as JJ'88 and, a few years later, played some of them for Contessa Gayles, a documentary director then filming The Feminist on Cellblock Y at the prison. Jacobs and his co-facilitator of a prison reading group, Richie Reseda, 'had a keyboard on a trash can in the corner of the gym – Richie was on the keys and 88 was singing and rapping', Gayles recalled recently. 'I just saw how incredibly talented they were and how beautiful and intimate the storytelling was in 88's lyrics.' The three stayed in touch, and once Reseda was released, began working on idea finally realizing a music video or two based on Jacobs's original treatments. The result is Songs from the Hole, a deeply moving and unconventional documentary that weaves Jacobs's musical visions first developed in solitary – bits of his handwritten 'first drafts/treatments for the visual album' appear on screen – with more traditional narrative footage of his life and loved ones outside prison. 'At the outset, we were really trying to be intentional about it not feeling like a traditional or familiar incarceration film,' said Gayles. 'We always understood this as not just an incarceration doc, but a music film, first and foremost. Creative expression was at the center.' Fittingly, much of Songs from the Hole plays out as the hip-hop visual album Jacobs initially envisioned in solitary – stories of his family, the West Coast gang culture in which he was raised, and the prison industrial complex that entraps and punishes Black men, with actors playing his younger self and Victor. Gayles, Reseda and Jacobs maintained an analog collaboration for years, some of which plays out on screen – handwritten snail mail, prison phone calls always capped at 15 minutes ('I didn't always know when they were coming in, so I just had to be ready with the phone and the recorder,' said Gayles). The production team would mail stills from the dailies, printed on paper, back to Jacobs for his input. Though the film includes recreations of incarceration as well as photos and audio from prison, the trio were 'intentional to not include any voices from the system', said Gayles, instead focusing on the experience of incarcerated people and their loved ones. Over many months and appeals to the state for clemency, Gayles checks in on his mother, Janine, father William, sister Reneasha, and his partner Indigo, whom Jacobs met when she visited prison as part of a group working for restorative justice. The goal, said Gayles, was to make Jacobs 'feel as present as possible while also putting the audience in a position of experiencing him in a similar way as his loved ones do – at a distance, primarily through the phone and letters'. In song and in those 15-minute prison phone calls, Jacobs describes how he followed his brother into life on the street and turned to violence as 'a tool that I used for everything'. Guns were easy to come by. Jacobs describes, with hard-earned clarity, his adolescent mindset; at 15, he believed that shooting someone would earn him respect, make him a man. That belief shattered quickly, compounded and twisted by the rage and grief he felt at losing Victor three days later. 'Part of what compelled me a lot about [Jacobs's] story was the fact that he and his family were in this position of being on both sides of that type of deadly violence,' said Gayles. 'He had the experience of taking a life, and then having a life taken from him.' For years, Jacobs felt angry and hopeless. He contemplated suicide. Then he met a fellow inmate named Jay, who spoke with genuine contrition, remorse and grace about the life he took as a young man. Jay inspired Jacobs to think deeply about the family he had irrevocably harmed, a path forward that did not foreground anger. (The family, never named, did not participate in the film.) Jacobs's journey toward forgiveness, both for himself and for his brother's killer, comes to a head in a latter-half scene that left my jaw on the floor – both at the human capacity for compassion despite everything, and at the carceral system's total disinterest in it. Time and again, the California correctional system continued a cycle of violence, predicated on vengeance, that Jacobs sought to escape. 'Violence isn't the only answer to violence,' said Gayles. 'When harm and violence happens, we don't need to answer it by introducing more harm and violence through punishment, revenge, retribution, incarceration.' Jacobs's partner Indigo puts it more bluntly: 'My healing is not found in someone else's punishment.' Despite the heavy subject matter, Songs from the Hole is anything but a portrait of despair. Jacobs endeavors to find joy – in education, in his family and fiancee, in the fact of being alive, in the 'manufactured hope' of his art. And, finally, freedom – in 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom commuted Jacobs's sentence based on the age at which he committed his crime and his rehabilitative work, making him immediately eligible for parole. In 2022, after 18 years in prison, Jacobs walked free. The film ends with footage of him in the studio recording new music, singing, enjoying the freedom to mess up a track, then record again. Jacobs's burgeoning music career is evidence that 'there are brilliant artists who are incarcerated, who have stories to tell that will impact and shift culture,' said Gayles. At one point in the film, still incarcerated and defeated by another legal setback, Jacobs made a list of reasons to keep living. It included his family, his partner, his art. The last one was a belief: 'My shortcomings do not diminish my good.' Over 106 minutes, Songs from the Hole makes as good a case as one can to believe it. 'We all have things in our lives that we need to heal from – harm that we have experienced and harm that we have caused,' said Gayles. 'I hope that this film is just an entry point, and potentially a tool, for folks to heal.' Songs from the Hole is out now on Netflix
Daily Mail
5 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
CNN's Abby Phillip gives Trump new nickname
CNN 's Abby Phillip has provided Donald Trump a new nickname - albeit accidentally and one his supporters quickly embraced. The CNN NewsNight host had been introducing a segment centered around Trump's deployment of federal troops to Washington, DC, Monday, when she compared the conservative to 'Batman' and the municipality to 'Gotham City.' 'He's taking over Washington's police force,' she further complained. 'It is a move that the DC mayor is calling unsettling and unprecedented.' Phillip argued Trump was 'painting [the situation] as an emergency' without much proof. Onlookers on X appeared more interested in her earlier remarks. Conservative pundit Steve Guest thought the comparison to DC's caped crusader made Trump look 'cool' - even if it was not 'Abby's intention at all.' The conservative media watchdog group Media Research Center's investigation team, Newsbusters, added: 'Does she know that makes him sound awesome?' Others embraced the epithet with memes, including some showing Trump in costume as the comic book character. 'I already voted for him! You don't have to keep convincing me!' Libs Of TikTok's X account joked. 'Yall really trying to make @realDonaldTrump look even more [expletive] aren't you @abbydphillip?' asked someone else. Others shared a clip of a 2015 interaction between a then campaigning Trump and a young boy on his helicopter. 'Are you Batman?' the boy asked. 'I am Batman,' the soon-to-be president said in response. The rest of the CNN NewsNight discussion revolved around crime in Washington, which Phillip said was 'at a 30-year low.' Still, DC's murder rate is high - seventh in the nation when looking at cities with 250,000 or more citizens . The municipality has also been plagued by an uptick in violent crimes seen since 2020 - a year where there was a 30 percent increase in murders nationwide. Shoplifting crimes and attacks on government employees have persisted in the Capital ever since. They reached a post-pandemic peak in 2023. Crime has fallen in DC each year since. Trump has continued to highlight the 2023 spike as proof DC's police force needs to be under government control. Members of the National Guard were given orders to report to their stations on Tuesday morning. Trump signed an order summoning them the day before.
