Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced Thursday that a man convicted of fatally shooting a delivery driver who had stopped at an ATM in 1998 will be executed on July 18.
The state will execute Keith Edmund Gavin, 64, by lethal injection.
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The announcement came a week after the Alabama Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed.
Gavin received a capital murder conviction for the shooting death of William Clinton Clayton, Jr. in Cherokee County, northeast Alabama. Prosecutors said that Gavin shot Clayton, a delivery driver, as he stopped at an ATM to get money for dinner with his wife. A jury voted 10-2 in favor of Gavin’s death sentence. The trial court followed the jury’s recommendation and sentenced him to death.
Gavin’s lawyer had requested the court not sanction the execution, claiming that the state was putting Gavin at the “front of the line” ahead of other detainees who had exhausted their appeals.
On May 30, the state plans to kill Jamie Mills by lethal injection. The 2004 murder of a couple during a robbery led to Mills’ conviction.
Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution with nitrogen gas in January, but lethal injection is still the state’s principal method.
