Alabama scheduled to execute death row inmate for 1991 murder of couple

Alabama is scheduled to execute a death row inmate Thursday for his role in the murders of a couple in Gadsden in 1991.

Michael Shannon Taylor, 54, is set to be put to death by lethal injection for the deaths of Ivan and Lucille Moore during a robbery.

Taylor would be the third person executed in Alabama this year. Jeremy Tremaine Williams was put to death in August. Jeffery Lee was executed in September.

Ivey also commuted the death sentences of Charles “Sonny” Burton in March and Toforest Johnson in October.

According to court documents, Taylor was absent without leave from the Navy when he received a ride from Ivan and Lucille. He asked to use the couple’s telephone inside their home when Taylor beat them to death.

Taylor filed two appeals in state court Tuesday. The first is a request for a stay of execution with the Alabama Supreme Court. He also filed an appeal with the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals after the Etowah County Circuit Court ruled against him last week.

In his appeal, Taylor alleges that the state is violating its own law if it executes him by lethal injection because the Alabama Legislature passed a bill in 2018 that authorized execution by nitrogen gas. Federal courts in June ruled in response to a suit from Lee that Alabama’s nitrogen gas protocol violated Lee’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.

A subsection of the 2018 state law states that “if electrocution or nitrogen hypoxia are held unconstitutional, the method of execution shall be lethal injection,” according to the appeal filed by Taylor.

The law also states that “if lethal injection is held unconstitutional or otherwise becomes unavailable, the method of execution shall be by nitrogen hypoxia.”

“Thus, unavailability is a trigger only for replacing lethal injection,” Taylor’s appeal said.

Lethal injection is not an option for the state since it is “unavailable” because he chose to be executed by nitrogen gas and that execution method is still allowed, according to Taylor’s appeal.

Lee made a similar argument to Taylor’s but ultimately lost his challenge to the state’s decision to use lethal injection. U.S. District Judge Emily C. Marks declined to block that method, citing the situation had changed.

Neither the Alabama Supreme Court nor the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled on Taylor’s request by Wednesday afternoon.