An Alabama inmate, in a handwritten motion early Wednesday evening, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his lethal injection execution set for Thursday in the 1998 murder of a man at a bank ATM in Cherokee County.
Keith Edmund Gavin, 64, filed the motion to justices just before 7 p.m. Wednesday seeking a stay of execution. He apparently filed the appeal without help from his lawyers.
The motion centered around an appeal that Gavin filed earlier this summer in Cherokee County. In that case, a judge denied Gavin’s request to waive the filing fee for his claim surrounding the county’s jurisdiction over his conviction and sentence. Gavin argued in his motion to the U.S. Supreme Court that the Cherokee County judge shouldn’t have denied his request to waive the fees.
“In this case justice should not be denied because filing fee’s (sic) wasn’t paid when it should had been waved (sic) because of petitioner’s indigent status,” Gavin wrote in his plea to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court justices also issued an order denying an appeal by Gavin.
Cherokee County Circuit Court Judge Shaunathan C. Bell on July 10 ruled Gavin had more than enough money in his prison account to pay the filing fee and denied the request for indigent status and dismissing Gavin’s motion for relief from his conviction and death sentence.
That appeal came days after Gavin’s lawyers said no more lawsuits were likely. Gavin, through his lawyers, in June had filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama asking that an autopsy not be performed after his execution. Alabama agreed, and the case was dismissed. In that same lawsuit, the lawyers said Gavin didn’t expect any further appeals. But Gavin then filed the handwritten appeal on behalf of his self (or pro se) to the Cherokee County judge.
Efforts to reach Gavin’s attorneys for comment have been unsuccessful.
Gavin, 64, was sentenced to death for the March 1998 murder of William Clayton Jr. in Cherokee County. He is set to be executed July 18, but the timeframe could go into July 19 if there are delays. He is set to die by lethal injection at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, which is the only prison in the state with an execution chamber and where most death row inmates are housed. In his handwritten motion last week, Gavin had argued a jurisdictional issue and that jurors in his trial should not have been told about his previous conviction and sentence served for murder in Illinois.
In Gavin’s case, court records show he was on parole from Illinois when he was arrested in the shooting death of Clayton, a courier service driver who had parked his van to use an ATM machine in downtown Centre. He was finished with deliveries for the day and was stopping at Regions Bank to get money to take his wife to dinner. An Alabama jury convicted Gavin and voted 10-2 to recommend he be sentenced to death. The judge followed the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Gavin to death.