Alabama: Jamie Mills executed by lethal injection – despite questionable behavior of the prosecution
On Thursday evening, 50-year-old Jamie Ray Mills was executed by lethal injection by the US state of Alabama. Mills was sentenced to death for allegedly robbing and killing an elderly couple in their home with his wife in 2004 under the pretense of making a phone call.
The execution began about an hour and a half after the United States Supreme Court rejected a final appeal by Mills and a request for a stay of execution.
His lawyers argued in vain that the main witness for the prosecution – Jamie Mills’ wife – changed her testimony at the trial after apparently being offered a plea bargain to reduce her sentence, and that the death sentence against her client was therefore unlawful. Mills’ wife had initially told the police that a local drug dealer had committed the murders before she incriminated her husband at the trial.
Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which represented Mills for many years, released a statement after the execution: “By failing to honestly disclose the conversations and agreements with the state’s star witness against Jamie Mills at trial, prosecutors lied, misled and misrepresented the reliability of the evidence against Jamie Mills for 17 years. They were not honest with Jamie Mills, the jury, the judge, the federal and state appellate courts, or the public. New evidence documenting this fraud was dismissed as ‘too late’ so finality was more important than fairness. That is not justice.”