Stepping Toward Mercy: Alabama CW Has Long Protested Death Penalty

To Shelley Douglass, co-founder of Mary’s House Catholic Worker in Birmingham, Alabama, their vocal, physical opposition to the death penalty is simple:

“If you believe in not killing people, you don’t believe in the death penalty,” Douglass said on a phone call. 

Douglass, 79, founded Mary’s House with her husband, Jim Douglass, in 1993. 

The Douglasses had first arrived in Birmingham four years before as part of the Agape Community – a grassroots organization committed to resisting the shipment of nuclear weapons along the railroad from Amarillo, Texas to Trident bases on the East and West coasts.

But, by 1989, the Department of Energy decided to stop transporting weapons via train, because of the protestors who would stand on the tracks to block the shipments.

Since their original mission in Birmingham had stalled, the couple considered where they were called.

Shelley Douglass had spent time at Casa Maria Catholic Worker in Milwaukee before her marriage to Jim, and she had always wanted to open a Catholic Worker. In the fall of 1992, they met a Native American family trying to travel to Washington state, and they realized there was no shelter for families in Birmingham. This seemed like an invitation to answer.

Shortly after, Jim Douglass’ book, The Nonviolent Coming of God received the Pax Christi USA Book Award, which was presented at the University of Notre Dame. The award came with a $2,000 cash prize. So they decided to put half of it toward outstanding debts and $1,000 toward a house. They had three months to raise the remaining cost of the house, and Jim worked the phones until they had raised $26,000 in cash.

Their first guests were a mother and two children. One of her daughters wrote three phrases on a chalkboard that soon became a slogan for Mary’s House: “Feel welcome, feel comfortable, feel safe.”

Soon after their move to Birmingham, they helped to found Justice and Mercy for All–an ecumenical group that opposes the death penalty through prayer and direct action 

One of their friends from Boston told the Douglasses they should go to visit her penpal, who was held in Atmore, Alabama, and was on death row. Leroy White had been incarcerated since 1988, after he had shot his wife in a drunken fit of rage. “I have no idea,” how her friend met White, Douglass said. And Atmore is about as far from Birmingham as Boston is from New York City. “People don’t realize how big Alabama is,” Douglass said with a chuckle.

Despite the long drive, the Douglasses would make the six-hour round trip to Atmore, roughly once a month to visit White at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.

His wife’s family opposed the execution. White’s daughter opposed it. “Nobody who knew anything about the case was for the death penalty,” Douglass said. The fact that White was on death row could be traced back to a common plight of the poor: bad legal advice–his lawyer had advised him to plead not guilty instead of guilty. 

“The whole thing was just crazy – it points out all the faults in the system,” Douglass added.

White asked the Douglasses to serve as the witnesses at his execution, which was eventually carried out–despite an eleventh-hour stay by the Supreme Court that only bought White three more hours–on January 13, 2011.

She noted that the prisons are meticulous about limiting visitors. If you have the wrong shoes on, you can even be turned away to make the three-hour drive back home with nothing to show for it. But, starting on Monday of the week of the execution (executions are carried out on Thursdays in Alabama), the condemned can receive nearly unlimited visitors, who can visit 15 at a time.

On the day of the execution, the Douglass family and White’s daughter (who was sure the governor would pardon him) could visit until 2 p.m. As the 6 p.m. execution approached, they were asked to leave. “They do nothing for the family,” Douglass said. White’s daughter had been two at the time of her mother’s killing. But she and White’s family had made peace with him.

“[White’s] crime was literally a crime of passion,” Douglass said, “These are people who have never met him, who have no beef with him, who are killing him.”

Witnessing the execution was not a memory Douglass would repeat. “They do the best they can to make it impersonal,” said Douglass. She recalled the proceduralism of the killing with disgust. “It’s just barbaric.” And, dehumanizing for the men and women who do this for, ironically, a living.

“It’s thoroughly dehumanizing for everybody, including the people who do the killing,” Douglass added. “It really is torture.”

As of 2023, Alabama has the fifth-highest rate of state executions in the nation, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. But the judicial system in Alabama holds life cheaply: for every eight executions in Alabama, one has been exonerated, according to a report from Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative

Alabama’s state legislature ended the controversial practice of judicial override–where the judge could overrule the jury’s decision to forego the death penalty and instead sentence someone to life imprisonment–in 2017. But the legislature did not make this new law retroactive. Accordingly, at least 30 prisoners on death row have remained there by a judge’s now-illegal ruling instead of serving the prison sentence mandated by a jury of their peers. One of those condemned by judicial override was Kenneth Eugene Smith.

Representatives from nearly 60 national organizations gathered in Birmingham at the end of January to protest the killing of Smith, 58, with lethal nitrogen gas on January 25, 2024.

Smith’s case received global attention because he was executed using a novel method that essentially smothers the condemned to death. Smith’s spiritual advisor, Jeff Hood, who witnessed the execution said his execution was “one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.”

“Tonight Alabama causes humanity to take a step backward,” Smith said in his final words before he was killed.

On days that there is an execution scheduled, Mary’s House Catholic Worker holds vigil in Birmingham. Although they are three hours north of the William C. Holman Correctional Facility where Smith was suffocated on January 25, that night, they kept watch and prayed for humanity to take a step forward toward mercy.

All photos courtesy Mary’s House Catholic Worker.