Alabama executed a man on Thursday who admitted to the 2016 killings of five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fuelled rampage.
Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. at Holman prison in southern Alabama.
He was condemned to death after pleading guilty to the murders of Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Randall Reed, 22. Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed.
Prosecutors said the rampage on August 20, 2016, began when Dearman broke into a home in Citronelle, where his estranged girlfriend, who survived, had taken refuge.
Derrick Dearman was executed at Holman prison in southern Alabama on Thursday for killing five people in 2016.
Alabama Department of Corrections/AP
His execution took place after Dearman dropped his appeal of his death sentence, fired his lawyers and asked for his execution go forward.
He addressed the family members of the victims before his execution by lethal injection was carried out, The Associated Press reported.
“Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you,” he said to the victims’ families. “I’ve taken so much.” He then told his own family: “Y’all already know I love y’all.”
Ahead of his execution, Dearman issued a statement that his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, provided to Newsweek.
“I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for the terrible things that I have done,” Dearman said. “From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”
Robert Brown, the father of Robert Lee Brown, told reporters that “this don’t bring nothing back.”
“I can’t get my son back, I can’t get them back,” he said, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
But he said he has forgiven Dearman.
“I have to forgive him,” he said. “He asked us to forgive him. You can’t go to the Lord with a clenched fist, you have to have an open heart, like a baby’s heart.”
Court records say Dearman broke into the home in the early hours and attacked the victims while they were sleeping. He forced his girlfriend to get in a car, along with the baby of one of the victims, and drove them to his father’s home in Mississippi, Newsweek reported at the time. He later turned himself in.
Lawyers with the Equal Justice Initiative who represented Dearman in his appeal had argued that his trial counsel did not do enough to demonstrate his mental illness and lack of competency to plead guilty.
Dearman “suffered from lifelong and severe mental illness” but “no Alabama court even conducted a hearing to evaluate his competency to plead guilty, waive his right to counsel, or stop his appeals,” the EJI said in a statement on its website.
“Derrick Dearman stopped his appeals only after a lifetime of severe mental illness and suicidal behavior that Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored,” it said. “The State of Alabama has now executed him despite serious questions about the constitutionality of his conviction and death sentence.”
Dearman’s execution was one of two that were scheduled to take place on Thursday. Robert Roberson was set to be the nation’s first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, but the Texas Supreme Court halted his execution on Thursday night.
Update 10/18/24, 4:20 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
