Alabama Executes Thomas Whisenhant After a Record 32 Years on Death Row for the 1976 Murder of Cheryl Lynn Payton
Whisenhant had also pleaded guilty to killing two other Mobile County women. His lawyer argued he was too mentally ill to be executed.
Published
Thomas Whisenhant spent 32 years and 8 months on Alabama's death row, longer than any prisoner before him. On May 27, 2010, the state executed him for the 1976 murder of Cheryl Lynn Payton.
Whisenhant, 63, declined to make a final statement and was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. at Holman prison in Atmore, AL.com reported. Payton, a mother of two young sons, was abducted from the convenience store in Theodore where she was working alone on October 16, 1976, and killed. After his arrest, Whisenhant confessed, and in 1981 he pleaded guilty to the murders of two other women, Venora Hyatt and Patricia Hitt, receiving life without parole for each. He was first convicted and sentenced to death for Payton's murder in 1977. That conviction was reversed, a second jury tried him in 1981, and a third penalty proceeding was held in 1987. In 2009, a federal appeals court affirmed the denial of his habeas petition.
His lawyer, Richard Cohen, had argued for 23 years that Whisenhant was insane, citing a 1960s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by federal prison doctors. "He had no remorse -- none," said Payton's widower, Douglas Payton. "He died a much easier death than my wife." Whisenhant was the 241st prisoner executed in Alabama and the first since October 2009.
The execution summary compiled with the AL.com report gave Cheryl Lynn Payton's age as 23, while the federal appeals court described her as 24.
Sources
- Executions (ADOC executions list), Alabama Department of Corrections
- Thomas Warren Whisenhant (execution compilation incl. Mobile Register, May 27, 2010), Clark County Prosecuting Attorney (reproducing Mobile Register/AP)
- Whisenhant v. Allen, 556 F.3d 1198 (11th Cir. 2009), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (via CourtListener)