John Louis Evans

John Louis Evans III (January 4, 1950 – July 15, 1983) was the first inmate to be executed by the State of Alabama after the United States reinstituted the death penalty in 1976. The manner of his execution is frequently cited by opponents of capital punishment in the United States. Evans was born in Beaumont, Texas and died in Atmore, Alabama at the age of 33.

After his 1976 parole from an Indiana prison, Evans and fellow convict Wayne Ritter (January 30, 1954 - August 28, 1987) embarked on a two-month-long crime spree involving, by Evans's own admission, over thirty armed robberies, nine kidnappings, and two extortion schemes across seven states. On January 5, 1977 he and Ritter robbed and killed Edward Nassar, a pawn shop owner in Mobile, Alabama, while his two young daughters were in the store. The perpetrators fled, but were captured on March 7 by FBI agents in Little Rock, Arkansas. Among the evidence recovered was the gun used to shoot Nassar in the back, and another gun stolen from the pawn shop.

Although he gave a detailed confession, prosecutors refused to accept his plea of guilty because they wanted Evans sentenced to death, and under Alabama law, this is only allowed following a conviction by a jury. Evans was tried in State Circuit Court in Mobile, Alabama on April 26, 1977 for first-degree murder committed during commission of a robbery. During the trial, Evans again admitted to his crime and stated that he did not feel remorse and that under the same circumstances he would kill again. Furthermore, he threatened that if the jury did not sentence him to death, he would escape and murder each of them. Despite his testimony, the jury was instructed to consider all the evidence and to return a verdict of guilty only if the prosecutors had left no reasonable doubt. The jury convicted Evans of the capital offense charged, thus imposing the death penalty, after less than fifteen minutes of deliberation.

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