Judge halts execution of man for Christmas Eve murders in 1993
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A federal judge halted the execution of an Alabama inmate just hours before he was to be put to death.
Chief U.S. District Judge Keith Watkins on Thursday stayed the execution of 56-year-old Jeffery Lynn Borden. The reprieve came about four hours before Borden was set to be given a lethal injection at a southwest Alabama prison.
Watkins said the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month ordered additional proceedings in Borden’s challenge to the humaneness of the state’s lethal injection process.
The Alabama attorney general’s office said it would not appeal the stay. The attorney general said there was “insufficient time to lift the stay” before the death warrant expired at midnight.
Borden was convicted of killing his estranged wife, Cheryl Borden, and her father, Roland Harris, in Gardendale, Ala. Borden, who was separated from his wife, was returning their three children to a Christmas Eve gathering after a weeklong visit with him. Prosecutors said he shot Cheryl Borden in front of the children as she helped move their Christmas gifts and clothing and then shot Harris as he ran for help.
A jury recommended the death penalty by a 10-2 vote.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an appellate court injunction that had been blocking Borden’s execution.
Borden’s attorney, John Palombi, made a lastminute bid for another stay, noting the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month had ordered more proceedings in Borden’s challenge to the humaneness of Alabama’s lethal injection procedure. Palombi said Borden won his appeal, but the state was trying to “moot out his complaint” by executing him.
“The state can have no interest in carrying out its judgment using a method of execution that is the subject to a serious challenge to its constitutionality,” Palombi wrote in an emergency motion filed in Montgomery federal court.
Borden and other inmates have challenged the state’s use of the sedative midazolam at the start of executions, saying it would not reliably render them unconscious before other drugs stop their lungs and heart. Palombi wrote that the second drug, a paralytic to stop breathing, would make Borden feel like he was being “buried alive” and then the third drug, potassium chloride, “would cause a massive heart attack after burning him alive from the inside.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office has argued the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed four executions to proceed with the same drug combination, and that Borden presents nothing new that would justify a stay.
The state attorney general’s office urged the federal court to let the execution proceed.
“The State and the surviving victims — particularly Cheryl Borden’s children who witnessed this barbaric crime — have a strong interest in seeing Borden’s lawful sentence be carried out,” state attorneys wrote.