Alabama: Black Gets Executed for Involvement in Homicide of Three White Cops

Nathaniel Woods

He wasn’t the nigger who pulled the trigger, but he was a violent drug dealer.

That’s reason enough to put him down.

USA Today:

A Birmingham man was executed Thursday evening on a 2005 conviction of being an accomplice to the murder of 3 police officers.

Nathaniel Woods, 43, was pronounced dead at 9:01 p.m. CT after an execution that lasted 15 minutes. He had no final words.

Woods was put to death amid a storm of appeals and protests from supporters who noted that Woods did not actually kill officers Charles Bennett, Carlos “Curly” Owen and Harley Chisholm III on June 17, 2004, that Woods’ attorneys missed key deadlines in his appeals, and that the trigger man – also on death row – said Woods was not involved.

Woods had no final words before the execution began at 8:39 p.m. CT. He kept his head and shoulders elevated on the gurney he was strapped to for the first several minutes of the execution, looking at one of the galleries and occasionally moving his lips. He held his right finger out throughout the execution.

Woods showed labored breathing at 8:45 p.m., and his left arms jerked against its restraint. He did not respond to a consciousness test administered a minute later.

Officers Bennett, Owen and Chisholm were shot and killed in a drug house on Birmingham’s west side on June 17, 2004. The shooter, Kerry Spencer, is on death row. An execution date for Spencer has not been set.

In a statement Thursday night, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who denied appeals for clemency, accused Woods of luring the police officers into the house, and said two other individuals had been executed in Alabama since 1983 “for being an accomplice to capital murder.”

From left: Harley Alfred Chisholm III, Carlos Winston Owen and Charles Robert Bennett