He cradled his toddler grandchild for the primary and ultimate time. He picked at some meals. He posed for household images that captured smiles as strained because the dialog. Then somebody in cost stated it was time.
Nathaniel Woods assured his heavy-hearted father that all the pieces could be all proper. Dad, I really like you, he stated.
It was late afternoon on March 5, 2020, the day chosen by the state of Alabama to be Woods’ final. He had been convicted 15 years earlier in reference to the taking pictures deaths of three Birmingham cops — and ever since had been re-christened Cop Killer Nathaniel Woods.
But Woods by no means killed anybody. He was unarmed when the officers had been gunned down whereas speeding right into a drug home to execute a warrant for his arrest on a misdemeanor.
Alabama — one among 26 states the place an confederate may be sentenced to demise, in accordance with the American Civil Liberties Union — argued that Woods had deliberately lured the officers to their deaths. It didn’t need to show that he really killed anybody in searching for his conviction for capital homicide.
The Death Penalty Information Center estimates that of the nation’s 1,458 executions between 1985 and 2018, 11 concerned circumstances during which the defendant neither organized nor dedicated homicide. Even rarer are circumstances during which the particular person was unarmed and uninvolved in a violent act, comparable to a theft — circumstances like that of Woods.
“Nathaniel Woods is 100% innocent,” one other demise row inmate, Kerry Spencer, wrote in a letter in assist of Woods. “I know this to be a fact because I’m the man that shot and killed all three of the officers.”
Woods was a Black man residing within the Black-majority metropolis of Birmingham. But solely two of the dozen jurors listening to his case had been Black. The choose and the 2 prosecutors had been white, as had been the three victims.
He was additionally a Black man residing in Alabama, a state with a historical past of racial injustice and a full embrace of capital punishment. It has the nation’s highest variety of demise row inmates per capita and is the one state that doesn’t require jury unanimity in recommending demise.
After transient deliberations, the jury had voted, 10-2: demise.
In the annals of capital punishment, Woods will not be probably the most sympathetic determine: a drug vendor whose evasive actions led to 3 deaths who refused to indicate compassion. Still, simply as jurors struggled with studying Woods’ emotionless facial features, so too does the legislation battle with measures of punishment. How may it’s that the armed man who killed three officers continues to dwell whereas the unarmed man who fled dies?
The Path to 18th Street
On a scorching afternoon, all that separated the hostility between Woods and Officer Carlos Owen was a display screen door.
Their fraught standoff June 17, 2004, was unfolding at a bare-bones condominium within the metropolis’s Ensley part.
Woods was a clerk in a 24-hour drug operation run by his cousin Tyran Cooper. His job: gather the cash and hand over the medicine.
Woods spent his early childhood in Tuscaloosa, teasing his youthful sisters, Heavenly and Pamela. But they are saying the familial mirth all however ended when their dad and mom break up up.
Woods left college after the sixth grade and ultimately moved to Birmingham to dwell together with his father. He developed a knack for electronics, in addition to a knack for hassle, with arrests for housebreaking, reckless driving and public consuming.
He obtained a job at a Piggly Wiggly warehouse, nevertheless it didn’t stick. Now he was 28, with three younger youngsters and a job promoting medicine in an operation taking in $3,000 a day.
His work associate and pal Spencer, 23, had adopted the same path. He, too, had left college, had labored on the Piggly Wiggly warehouse and had younger youngsters. He was additionally snorting $350 price of cocaine a day and was normally armed.
Just two months earlier, in April 2004, their boss, Cooper, had helped set a Birmingham nook aglow with gunfire throughout a dispute that left two folks wounded. He was arrested a short time later.
For all of the medicine and gunplay, life on the 18th Street condominium handed with out police interruption, Spencer would later testify.
Except the police had been now on the again door.
Curly and RoboCop
Owen, 58, was a Birmingham Police Department fixture assigned to patrol the Ensley streets. Although he was a graying grandfather, everybody referred to as him by a nickname based mostly on an outdated coiffure: Curly.
Looming beside Owen on the again door was Officer Harley Chisholm III, a number of days wanting his forty first birthday. His on-the-job enthusiasm, coupled together with his 6-foot-4 body and wraparound sun shades, had earned the six-year police veteran and former Marine a nickname of his personal: RoboCop.
Curly and RoboCop, the patrolling guardians of Ensley. Some within the neighborhood revered them, some feared them, and a few — together with Cooper — thought of them corrupt.
In a 2012 affidavit, Cooper claimed to have paid safety cash to Owen and Chisholm for years — with weekly payoffs of as a lot as $1,000. In return, he stated, they suppressed native competitors and tipped him off to the buy-and-bust operations of narcotics officers.
But Cooper stated that after he was arrested on tried homicide prices — in reference to that taking pictures spree in April 2004 — the 2 officers raised their value to $3,000 per week. At that time, he stated, he stopped paying them for defense.
Others who lived in Ensley instructed comparable tales in regards to the two officers. But neither man was ever formally accused of corruption, in accordance with Annetta Nunn, the police chief on the time.
A Burst of Violence
The display screen door standoff was the end result of escalating tensions that day on the 18th Street condominium. There had already been one earlier encounter, if not two, however there isn’t any query that Owen and Chisholm arrived on the condominium round 10:30 that morning — to examine on stolen automobiles, they stated — and that they obtained right into a heated argument with Woods and Spencer.
At some level, Woods gave his title as a result of, his defenders say, he believed he had finished nothing fallacious.
Before the officers left the scene, they used the patrol automobile pc of Officer Michael Collins, who had arrived within the midst of the confrontation, to run Woods’ title by way of prison databases. The drug sellers, in the meantime, started hiding their paraphernalia — in anticipation.
Spencer stated that he then took a tablet, drank a Bud Lite and went to sleep. Beside him: a semi-automatic rifle.
Less than three hours later, the police acquired affirmation that Woods was wished in close by Fairfield on a misdemeanor assault cost associated to a four-month-old home disturbance. This time, 4 cops pulled as much as the condominium: Owen, Chisholm, Collins and Charles Robert Bennett.
Owen was on the again door once more, telling Woods that there was an impressive warrant for his arrest and to come back exterior. Woods refused.
When Chisholm was summoned from the entrance yard to verify the warrant’s existence, Collins later stated, Woods ran deeper into the condominium. Chisholm rushed in after him, adopted by Owen and Collins.
Some of what occurred subsequent is in dispute: whether or not the police used pepper spray, whether or not the police drew their weapons. But there isn’t any doubt of the sudden explosion of violence that adopted, detailed by Spencer in a cellphone video recorded from demise row final yr.
He stated that he woke as much as commotion, appeared out a window to see a police automobile after which noticed Woods stumbling out of the kitchen. Seeing motion, he opened hearth together with his semi-automatic, killing Chisholm and Owen. One bullet nicked Collins as he fled out the again door.
Bennett got here by way of the entrance door and, Spencer stated, “I hit him, like, three times.”
Amid the gunfire, Woods began to flee, passing Bennett mendacity on the bottom.
Spencer stated he went to the again door and sprayed a patrol automobile with bullets to scare off Collins. As he ran out the entrance door, he sensed that the gravely wounded Bennett was making an attempt to seize his leg. He shot him within the head.
An anxious however decided manhunt adopted. Woods watched the exercise whereas sitting on a porch diagonally throughout from the condominium. He surrendered when recognized, satisfied that he could be positive as a result of he had not killed anybody.
Judge and Jury
The officers’ deaths staggered Alabama. A yr later, it was time to prosecute the 2 males charged with inflicting these deaths.
Spencer was convicted first. In presenting a case of self-defense, his lawyer apparently raised sufficient doubt about what the police had been doing on the condominium that the jury advisable life with out parole reasonably than the demise penalty.
But Alabama at the moment allowed judges to overrule jury suggestions — which the choose did by sentencing Spencer to demise.
A month later, in October 2005, Woods stood trial on the identical capital homicide prices for which Spencer had simply been convicted.
Woods’ legal professionals had confidence of their case, however prosecutors challenged the premise that the taking pictures was unplanned by portraying Woods as a police-hating prison who had purposely led the officers to their deaths within the condominium.
Woods was convicted of all counts. Then got here the sentencing part.
With the jury about to resolve whether or not he ought to dwell or die, Woods took the stand.
Asked by his lawyer, Cynthia Umstead, whether or not he had something to say to the households of the useless officers, Woods responded, “Well, I really don’t have no feeling about the officers. I really didn’t have nothing to do with it, but if they feel they need to take my blood, then fine. If they be satisfied with that, then it’s fine.”
His response flabbergasted one juror, Chris McAlpine. “That’s all he said,” he recalled. “And I remember sitting there going, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s the best you could come up with, knowing what we’re fixing to decide?’”
Another juror, Curtis Crane, recalled feeling the complete gravity of the jury’s duty. “You ask yourself: What gives you the right to do this?” he stated. “You’re just a man; just a person. What gives you the right to tell somebody else they’ve got to die?”
This basic query explains why, in 2005, practically each state with a capital punishment statute required a jury to be unanimous in recommending demise. At the time, solely Florida, Delaware and Alabama allowed for a nonunanimous jury suggestion of demise; at the moment, the apply continues solely in Alabama, the place 10 of a dozen jurors is taken into account enough.
Deliberations had been brief however intense. According to McAlpine, the vote got here right down to 10 jurors in favor of demise, and two jurors, each Black ladies, opposed.
Fight to Spare a Life
Woods spent the subsequent 15 years on the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, notorious for its violence and overcrowding. The state started shutting down a lot of the jail in early 2020, nevertheless it stays the place the place Alabama’s condemned dwell and die.
All the whereas, Woods’ household fought to have his life spared. A succession of legal professionals made a succession of determined arguments. None discovered buy.
As Woods swayed between hope and despair, he corresponded with members of the family. He wrote poetry. He transformed to Islam.
Finally, on Jan. 30, 2020, jail officers offered Woods with a one-page doc to signal. It stipulated that he was to be executed March 5.
No comparable letter has been despatched to Spencer. Unlike Woods, he managed to increase his life by choosing demise by nitrogen hypoxia. The protocols for this untested gassing technique have but to be finalized in Alabama — the one state to approve it — which implies that the person who killed three cops would proceed to dwell whereas his unarmed affiliate would die.
A month earlier than Woods’ scheduled execution, two unlikely advocates took up his case: Lauren Faraino, 30, a company lawyer with no expertise in capital homicide circumstances, and her mom, Elaena Starr, 60.
Turning Faraino’s kitchen right into a command middle, they scoured courtroom paperwork, interviewed witnesses and capitalized on the media contacts of Starr’s husband, Bart Starr Jr., the son of Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr.
March 5 arrived. At about 4 p.m., Woods stated his ultimate goodbyes to his household and disappeared behind a door.
Faraino, in the meantime, was frantically making an attempt to have the 6 p.m. execution referred to as off.
With lower than an hour to go, Kimberly Chisholm Simmons, a sister of the late Chisholm, returned her name. “He didn’t kill my brother,” Simmons instructed Faraino, in accordance with a recording of their name.
Faraino started to cry. “If I, if I can get you in touch with, with, someone at the governor’s office, would you convey that message to them?” she requested.
“Yes I will,” Simmons stated.
With Simmons nonetheless on the road, Faraino tried to achieve the state of Alabama. Faraino lastly managed to ship the governor a press release from Simmons that asserted Woods’ innocence and included a plea: “I beg you to have mercy on him.”
Mercy was fleeting.
About 22 minutes earlier than the scheduled 6 p.m. execution, Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court granted a brief keep, permitting for yet another evaluation of the case. With the demise warrant expiring at midnight, the Supreme Court had six hours to resolve Woods’ destiny.
At 7:35, phrase got here that Gov. Kay Ivey had determined that clemency for Woods was “unwarranted.” A couple of minutes later, the Supreme Court lifted the keep.
At 8:08, a disconsolate Faraino despatched an e-mail to one of many legal professionals who had fought for Woods’ life: “It’s over Alicia. They are executing him.”
Woods was declared useless at 9:01 p.m. He was 43. He is buried in a Muslim cemetery in Georgia, an excellent 50 miles from the Alabama line.