Charles “Sonny” Burton Jr., 75, was scheduled to be executed in Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility on March 12. But two days before he was to be forced to inhale fatal nitrogen gas, Gov. Kay Ivey — who has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017 — commuted his death sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
Burton’s sentence was as surprising as Ivey’s decision. While he participated in the 1991 robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama, which led to the death of a customer, Burton didn’t pull the trigger. He had left the store before Doug Battle was shot and killed. But Burton was tried under the state’s felony murder law which allows prosecutors to bring murder charges against anyone who participates in a crime connected to a killing.
While Burton was on death row, Derrick DeBruce, the man who killed Battle, had his death sentence commuted to life without parole due to ineffective counsel. Ivey cited this disparity between DeBruce’s and Burton’s outcomes in explaining her commutation:“I cannot proceed in good conscience with the execution of Mr. Burton under such disparate circumstances,” she said in a statement, according to the Alabama Reflector. “I believe it would be unjust for one participant in this crime to be executed while the participant who pulled the trigger was not.”
Pushing a governor who is staunchly in favor of the death penalty to stop an execution requires intense advocacy. Burton’s daughter, Carolyn Amanda Shavers, was a driving force in the campaign. Here, she writes about the persistence of injustice in Alabama, how March 10 was the happiest day of her life, and how she is pushing for her dad’s release.
In my life, justice is like Bigfoot. A lot of people say it exists, but sometimes it seems that people like me and my family don’t ever get to see it.
My father, Charles “Sonny” Burton spent over three decades on death row, even though everyone knew he never killed a soul. March 12 was the day they were supposed to suffocate the life out of him. And all I could do was pray to God that they didn’t take him away from me, because he’s all I got left.
My dad did commit a robbery. It’s been hard for me to even believe that, because that’s not who he raised me to be. But one day, in Talladega in 1991, he and five other guys robbed a store. During the robbery a guy named Derrick DeBruce shot and killed a customer, Doug Battle. DeBruce got the death penalty.
So did my dad.
My father was the only non-shooter to get the death penalty. Two of his accomplices who didn’t pull the trigger were sentenced to 25 years. The other two who didn’t shoot anyone got life with the possibility of parole.
I refused to believe that my dad was facing execution. I even decided that I would not have a child of my own, until my daddy somehow came home to me. So now, I’m 57, and mostly alone.
My dad’s case is only part of my story. I was mostly raised by my momma, Carolyn Burton, in Montgomery because my dad was in and out of prison. I spent my whole childhood waiting for him to come home.
One day, in 1988, when I was 19, I came home to find my momma and her friend on the floor dead. Someone had stabbed them all over their bodies. My momma was face down, skirt up, hair stuck to the ground. Seeing her that way took everything out of my body. I lost my life. I lost my way.
In August 1991, the guy who did it, Larry Green, finally pleaded guilty to murder. He got a life sentence. In April 1992, I found out that my dad had been sentenced to death.
It was so hard to wrap my head around it. My father didn’t kill anyone or ask for anyone to be killed. And he got a death sentence. Meanwhile my mother’s killer, Larry Green, stabbed two people, and he got life. Derrick DeBruce, the guy who shot Doug Battle during the robbery, was also sentenced to death but his sentence was eventually reduced to life without parole because his counsel was found to be inadequate. It didn’t make a lick of sense.
Meanwhile, after serving 35 years, Green was released on medical parole. At the same time, the state was fixing on executing my dad as we begged for clemency. How was that fair? Fair to my dad? Fair to me?
At night my mind would wander, searching for the key to this puzzle. I’d heard folks talk about racial disparities in incarceration, police bias and police brutality. And while I don’t know all of the numbers, I come back to what I had seen my whole life: Things in Montgomery look so different for people who live in my community. Living between Rosa Parks’ old home, the Holt Street Baptist Church where mass meetings took place, and the Road to Selma civil rights trail, opportunity always seems to be somewhere else.
My daddy was not even 5 in 1955 when Ms. Parks made some good trouble on a segregated city bus by refusing to surrender her seat to a White man. He told me that at 15, he risked being beaten by police and bitten by dogs when he joined Dr. Martin Luther King’s march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. I came along in 1968, when Southern trees were still rotting with the fruit of lynchings.
A lot has changed since then. But there are major racial disparities in punishment. According to The Sentencing Project, Black people made up one-third of those executed between 1976 and 2022, and are more than 40% of the population on death rows around the country. I also believe that the racism buried deep in Alabama’s red clay explains why this state was about to gas my dad like an animal in a slaughterhouse.
My father, my family and I lived on the rollercoaster of his death sentence for 34 years. We’d hold on to hope that his sentence would be commuted, only for it to slip out of our hands, like fine sand. For a lot of years I thought this nightmare would end with him coming home to me. But when the courts denied his last appeal in 2013, the best we could get was clemency. I had to accept that my dad would never be free. But he would be alive.
Six weeks ago, when Gov. Ivey announced that my father would be executed on March 12, it felt like a million bricks were piled on my chest. It was like I was the one getting choked to death. Every day another brick.
So I had to get strong and be the woman my momma and dad raised me to be. I stood in front of the governor’s mansion with a bullhorn and cried my heart out to everyone passing by. Please save my daddy!
I marched to the capitol carrying more than 67,000 signatures of people who were fighting with us. It was scary to hope, but love made me brave. I prayed and promised; the devil was not going to take my daddy’s life. Four days before his execution date, we went to Atmore, where they have an electric chair, lethal shots, a gas chamber and folks caged with expiration dates, like that’s normal.
On the morning of March 10, as I was getting ready to see my dad, I got the news that Gov. Ivey was going to spare his life. I dropped to my knees in my hotel room and thanked her, God and everyone who helped us along this way.
When I got to the prison and saw my dad, it was like I could finally breathe. I could hug him for the first time, without the fear that it would be the last time. In that place full of death, I had the very best day of my life.
If I had lost a second parent, I don’t know what would have happened to me. But now I am alright. I know I can bear what’s to come. And I swear, when I looked out my hotel room that night, with my view of the Alabama woods, I could see Bigfoot out there, dancing.
This fight is not over. My dad did not commit capital murder, and if Green can get released after 35 years because he was sick, I know there has to be some way for my dad, too. God ain’t gonna sleep on this, and I will continue to pray for the day he comes home.
Carolyn Amanda Shavers has lived in Montgomery, Alabama, for most of her life. For several years she worked as a prison guard, and she has also worked in nursing homes as a caretaker.