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Sonny Burton: Alabama’s Next Target Didn’t Kill Anyone

Sonny Burton: Alabama’s Next Target Didn’t Kill Anyone

Last updated on: December 27, 2025 at 7:48 pm by Jeff Hood

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Sonny Burton: Alabama’s Next Target Didn’t Kill Anyone 2025-12-27T19:48:13-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Sonny Burton

Sonny Burton’s Present State / Personal Image

The Daughter Knows Sonny Burton Didn’t Do It

There’s a girl in Alabama who lost her daddy. Nine years old when it happened. Doug Battle went to work at an AutoZone in Talladega in 1991 and never came home. A man named Derrick DeBruce shot him dead during a robbery.

That girl grew up. Her name is Tori Battle. And just days ago, she wrote something that ought to stop every breathing person in this state: “Alabama plans to execute Charles ‘Sonny’ Burton, a man who did not kill my father.”

The victim’s daughter. Begging the state not to kill the wrong man.

Sonny Burton Wasn’t Even There

Sonny Burton was already outside. Already in the car. DeBruce pulled the trigger while Burton was gone. He didn’t order it. Didn’t see it. When he found out what happened, witnesses say he shook his head and said, “Let’s get out of here.” The State of Alabama does not dispute any of this. Not one word.

And still they want to kill him. The Attorney General has asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set the date. That request sits there right now, waiting for the court to say when.

The State Admitted that Sonny Burton Didn’t Do It

Here’s what should keep you up at night: Derrick DeBruce…the man who pulled the trigger, the man who put Doug Battle in the ground…is not on death row. Alabama agreed to give him life without parole. The killer lives. The man who didn’t kill faces the gas mask.

Alabama knows this is backwards. In their own court filings, state attorneys wrote that this situation is “arguably unjust.” Their words. In public. On the record. Dunn v. DeBruce, 2015, No. 14-807. The state confessing with its own mouth that what it’s about to do cannot be defended.

Even Texas has shown more conscience than Alabama on this. Greg Abbott commuted Thomas Whitaker because the shooter got less time than the non-shooter. Rick Perry…Rick Perry, who killed more people than any governor in American history…commuted Kenneth Foster for the same reason. Virginia did it for Ivan Teleguz. The math isn’t hard. You don’t execute the man who didn’t pull the trigger while the man who did gets to keep breathing.

But Alabama, drunk on its own killing, won’t see it.

The Sonny Burton They Want to Kill

Sonny Burton is not the man who walked into that AutoZone in 1991.

He is seventy-four years old. He moves by wheelchair. The prison classifies him as a fall risk. He lives with severe rheumatoid arthritis that puts him in daily pain. He has hepatitis C. His health, by every account, is deteriorating.

And his mind. Sonny requires medication for mental health issues. When the prison ran out of his medication, he became delusional. Paranoid. His lawyer received calls multiple times a week…Sonny recounting nightmarish events that weren’t real, that couldn’t be real. This is what happens when the state neglects to give him his pills.

Thirty-three years later, this is the man Alabama wants to strap to a gurney. This is the man they want to put the mask on. A sick, aging, mentally fragile man in a wheelchair who didn’t kill anyone.

This is who the state calls the worst of the worst.

I Watched Them Die

And the method. God help us, the method.

They call it nitrogen hypoxia. They say it’s humane. They say it’s peaceful. They are lying.

I know because I was there. I stood in that chamber as Kenny Smith’s spiritual advisor and watched them kill him. I was there again when they killed Anthony Boyd.

There is nothing peaceful about it. Kenny writhed. He shook against the restraints. He gasped. The state promised seconds. It took twenty-two minutes for him to die. Twenty-two minutes. And Anthony…Anthony’s execution ran thirty-eight minutes. The longest nitrogen suffocation in American history. I counted more than two hundred breaths. Agonized breaths. I watched his eyes roll back. I watched his body jolt against the gurney over and over and over. I stood there and I witnessed it and I am telling you: what Alabama calls humane is a man suffocating to death while the state times it on a clock.

Justice Sotomayor called it torture. She wrote that Boyd only asked for “the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by torturous suffocation.” The Court said no.

And now they want to do this to a man who never killed anyone.

Stop This

Sonny Burton is in a wheelchair now. Thirty-three years on death row for another man’s crime. While he sat in that cell, his wife was murdered…and the man who killed her has already been paroled. He has owned what he did. He knows the robbery was reckless. He knows he put people at risk. But he did not kill Doug Battle. That has never been the question.

Tori Battle knows it. The daughter of the dead man knows it. And she is asking Governor Kay Ivey to do what justice demands: clemency.

Not release. Not forgiveness. Just fairness. Life without parole…the same sentence they gave the man who actually pulled the trigger.

Governor Ivey can stop this before the court sets a date. She can listen to the victim’s own family. She can read what her own attorneys wrote. Or she can let Alabama kill a man who killed no one, using a method three Supreme Court justices have called torture, in a case her own state has admitted is arguably unjust.

The request is sitting on the court’s desk right now. The window is now.

Tori Battle was nine years old when she lost her father. She is asking Alabama not to make her watch the state kill the wrong man.

for more information here @ACLU & here @ Montgomery Advertiser

sign the petition here @ Death Penalty Action

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian, writer and activist who has spent years ministering to people on death row. As a spiritual advisor and witness to executions, he speaks out against state violence and calls for a society rooted in justice, mercy and the sacredness of life. You can read more about the author here.

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