State of Alabama Seeks to Execute Jeremy Williams

The State of Alabama plans to execute Jeremy Williams, 41, by lethal injection this Thursday, August 13.

In 2022, Jeremy Williams was charged with four counts of capital murder after he confessed to killing five-year-old Kamarie Holland. On March 13, 2024, Mr. Williams pled guilty to all four capital counts and asked for the death penalty to bring closure to the family of the victim in the case.

Even though Mr. Williams entered a guilty plea and accepted responsibility for his actions, the law in Alabama required a jury to attend a trial where prosecutors presented evidence about the crime, including dozens of distressing and wholly unnecessary photos and videos.

Because of Mr. Williams’s guilty plea, he was not allowed to challenge the admissibility of the State’s inflammatory and prejudicial evidence.

And in an effort to spare jurors a drawn-out trial, Mr. Williams had instructed his lawyer not to object to anything the prosecutors did during trial, leaving constitutional errors unchallenged. Mr. Williams was convicted on April 12, 2024.

Mr. Williams waived sentencing by a jury and did not present any mitigating evidence—which is typically presented in a capital sentencing hearing to provide support for a sentence of life imprisonment without parole instead of death. With no mitigating evidence to consider, the trial court sentenced Mr. Williams to death.

In cases where a death sentence is imposed, Alabama law requires an automatic appeal. Mr. Williams was allowed to represent himself on appeal and he did not file a brief in the Court of Criminal Appeals, which issued a terse opinion on March 27, 2026, affirming Mr. Williams’s conviction and death sentence. On June 16, even though it received no evidence or argument about Mr. Williams’s background or mental health, the Alabama Supreme Court found it appropriate to execute him.

On June 18, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered prison staff to put Mr. Williams to death on August 13.

“Volunteers” and Mental Illness

A competent person could admit guilt and accept accountability without the death penalty in ways that could be legitimate. But the death penalty introduces the specter that suicidal ideation, mental illness, and insufficient evidence will contribute to a wrongful execution.

Studies show a strong link between “volunteering” (waiving appeals to hasten execution) and severe men­tal ill­ness.

Professor John Blume of Cornell Law School found that of 106 “volunteers,” at least 93 (88%) had documented mental illness or severe substance-abuse disorders. “Even more striking,” the study found, “is the prevalence of the most severe mental illness”—14 cases involved schiz­o­phre­nia and sev­er­al more report­ed delu­sions that may reflect schiz­o­phre­nia. Depression and bipo­lar dis­or­der account­ed for at least 23 oth­er cas­es, and post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der was present in anoth­er 10. At least 30 of those who ​“vol­un­teered” for exe­cu­tion had pre­vi­ous­ly attempt­ed sui­cide.

Two decades later, researchers found that the num­ber of people waiv­ing their appeals and choos­ing exe­cu­tion remains high. Analysts estimate that one in 10 mod­ern exe­cu­tions are the result of the person’s decision to end their appeals.

“[S]cores of people have been exe­cut­ed on their own request despite evi­dence of severe men­tal ill­ness and oth­er seri­ous con­sti­tu­tion­al con­cerns about their con­vic­tions and death sentences,” the Death Penalty Information Center reported in 2024, citing the extremely low bar courts use to find a person is competent to waive capital appeals.

Unlike people who seek assisted suicide or medical aid in dying, people sentenced to death who are physically health and openly suicidal are nonetheless permitted to request execution dates.

The Supreme Court “has permitted the State’s mechanism of execution to be trig­gered by an entire­ly arbi­trary fac­tor: the defendant’s deci­sion to acqui­esce in his own death,” Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in 1979. This process is ​“noth­ing less than state-administered suicide.”

Executing people because they waive their appeals compounds the arbitrariness of executions in this country, where who gets executed too often turns on factors like poverty and race. In four states that have since abolished the death penalty or imposed moratoria on executions, only people who gave up their appeals were executed. Put differently, it is highly likely that no executions would have been carried out in those states but for “volunteerism.”

“One of the largest con­cerns about vol­un­teer­ing is that it allows exe­cu­tions to occur despite lin­ger­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al ques­tions about the volunteer’s con­vic­tion and death sen­tence,” researchers wrote.

Justice Marshall insisted that “[s]ociety’s inde­pen­dent stake in enforce­ment of the Eighth Amendment’s pro­hi­bi­tion against cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment can­not be over­rid­den by a defendant’s pur­port­ed waiv­er.”

But DPIC found that many “vol­un­teers” have been put to death with unre­solved con­sti­tu­tion­al claims that could have barred their executions, such as intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, severe men­tal ill­ness, compelling mitigation evidence that was not presented at sentencing, and even inno­cence.