Alabama set to execute man for fatal shooting of a delivery driver during a 1998 robbery attempt
A man convicted of killing a delivery driver who stopped at an ATM to withdraw money to go out to dinner with his wife faces execution Thursday night in Alabama.
Keith Edmund Gavin, 64, will receive a lethal injection at a prison in southwest Alabama. He was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of William Clayton Jr. in Cherokee County.
Alabama last week agreed in Gavin’s case to waive the post-execution autopsy normally performed on executed inmates in the state. Gavin, who is Muslim, said the procedure violate his religious beliefs. Gavin had filed a lawsuit to block plans for an autopsy, and the state settled the complaint.
Clayton, a delivery driver, had driven to an ATM in downtown Centre on the evening of March 6, 1998. He had just gotten off work and was getting money to take his wife out to dinner, according to a summary of court testimony. Prosecutors said Gavin shot Clayton during an attempted robbery, pushed him into the passenger seat of the van Clayton was driving and drove away in the vehicle. A police officer testified that he began chasing the van and that the driver — a man he later identified as Gavin — shot him before fleeing on foot into the woods.
Gavin was on probation in Illinois at the time, after serving 17 years of his 34-year sentence for murder, court documents show.
“There is no doubt about Gavin’s guilt or the seriousness of his crime,” the Alabama Attorney General’s Office wrote in its request for an execution date for Gavin.
A jury convicted Gavin of first-degree murder and voted 10-2 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed. Most states now require a jury to agree unanimously to impose a death sentence.
A federal judge ruled in 2020 that Gavin did not have a sufficient attorney at the hearing because his original attorneys failed to provide mitigating factors for Gavin’s violent and abusive childhood.
Gavin grew up in a “gang-infested housing project in Chicago, where he lived in overcrowded, dilapidated housing, surrounded by drug activity, crime, violence and riots,” U.S. District Judge Karon O’Bowdre wrote.
A federal appeals court overturned the decision, leaving the death penalty in place.
Gavin had largely dealt with his own appeals in the days leading up to his scheduled execution. He filed a handwritten motion for a stay of execution, asking that “for the sake of life and limb” the lethal injection be halted. A circuit judge and the Alabama Supreme Court denied that motion.
Death penalty opponents delivered a petition to Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday asking him to pardon Gavin. They argued that there are questions about the fairness of Gavin’s trial and that Alabama is bucking the “declining trend of executions” in most states.
“There is no place for the death penalty with the progress we have as a society,” said Gary Drinkard, who spent five years on Alabama’s death row. Drinkard was convicted of murdering a junkyard dealer in 1993, but the Alabama Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2000. He was acquitted at his second trial after his defense attorneys presented evidence that he was home at the time of the killing.
If carried out, it would be the state’s third execution this year and the 10th in the nation, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Missouri have also carried out executions this year. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday the planned execution was halted of a Texas inmate 20 minutes before he was to receive a lethal injection.