State Executes Robert Melson at Holman Prison Near Atmore for 1994 Gadsden Killings
The state of Alabama carried out its second execution in as many weeks last week, putting to death Robert Bryant Melson at Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore for the 1994 killings of three fast-food workers in Gadsden. Melson, who had spent more than two decades on death row, was pronounced dead at 10:27 p.m., according to a prison spokesman who confirmed the time to reporters gathered near the facility.
Melson was convicted in the deaths of Tamika Collins, Nathaniel Baker and Darrell Collier, who were all working at a Gadsden fast-food restaurant when they were shot during a robbery. A fourth employee survived the attack. The killings occurred more than 23 years before the execution, and the case had wound through state and federal appeals for most of that time.
In the two days before the execution, Melson received visits from family members, including his uncle, brother, aunt and cousin, along with two attorneys, according to corrections officials. On the day of the execution he declined both breakfast and a final meal and made no special requests.
A Stay, Then the Procedure
The execution, originally scheduled for 6 p.m., was delayed for several hours after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay while justices reviewed last-minute legal challenges from Melson’s attorneys over the state’s use of midazolam in its three-drug lethal injection protocol. Defense attorneys and medical experts have argued the sedative can fail to keep condemned inmates unconscious during executions, pointing to Alabama’s December 2016 execution of Ronald Bert Smith, during which the inmate coughed and heaved for roughly 13 minutes after the drug was administered.
The Supreme Court lifted its stay without comment at about 9:10 p.m., clearing the way for the execution to proceed. Roughly 20 minutes later, a small group of media witnesses was driven by prison van from a nearby media staging area to a witness room adjoining the execution chamber at Holman.
Witnesses described a brief wait in a room lit by a single salmon-colored light before a curtain was drawn back to reveal Melson strapped to a gurney, with intravenous lines running into the backs of both his hands. Rows of fluorescent lights lit the small chamber from above.
Around 9:54 p.m., the warden read the death warrant and asked Melson if he had any final words. He shook his head to indicate no, and the warden and an assistant left the chamber, leaving only a guard and a chaplain with the inmate. Moments later, the chaplain placed a hand over Melson’s and appeared to pray before stepping back as the lethal injection began.
Witnesses said Melson’s hands, chest and face shook against the gurney’s restraints for roughly a minute before the movement subsided. At 10:03 p.m., a guard performed consciousness checks, calling Melson’s name three times, then pulling back his eyelid and pinching his arm without any response. By 10:07 p.m., his breathing had stopped, though his fists remained clenched. Media witnesses were escorted from the room around 10:15 p.m., and prison officials confirmed Melson’s death roughly a dozen minutes later.
The Victims’ Families and State Officials
Following the execution, relatives of the victims released a statement, read to reporters by the state’s prisons commissioner, criticizing Melson’s legal efforts to avoid what they characterized as any suffering during his execution. The statement noted Melson had spent more than two decades on death row at state expense while his victims had no such consideration shown to them.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement that the execution closed out a case that had spanned more than two decades. He said the families of the victims, along with the surviving employee, had waited years for the case to reach its conclusion.
Gov. Kay Ivey, who denied a clemency request from Melson in the days before the execution, said in a statement that she did not take lightly her responsibility in capital cases but considered it her duty to ensure justice was carried out on behalf of both victims and the convicted. She said she had reviewed the facts of the case, the trial evidence and the mitigating factors Melson’s attorneys presented before concluding that his clemency petition should be denied.
Calls for Scrutiny
Not everyone treated the execution as a closed matter. State Sen. Dick Brewbaker, who had already announced he would not seek re-election, used the case to call for renewed scrutiny of Alabama’s capital punishment system. He said the state’s death penalty process was less sound than many lawmakers believed and called for the creation of an innocence commission or conviction integrity units in each judicial circuit.
Brewbaker’s proposal joined a running national conversation about post-conviction review — mechanisms that allow cases to be reexamined for flawed evidence, unreliable testimony or procedural failures years after a sentence is carried out. Conviction integrity units, where they exist, sit inside prosecutors’ offices and reopen cases on their own initiative; innocence commissions review systemic causes of wrongful convictions. Neither mechanism existed in Alabama’s judicial circuits at the time of Melson’s execution.
The System’s Standing Numbers
At the time of Melson’s execution, Alabama had no other execution dates scheduled, though the state’s death row held 182 inmates. The case renewed debate in Escambia County and across Alabama over the state’s lethal injection protocol, which remains the subject of ongoing legal challenges statewide.
Holman Correctional Facility, located near Atmore in Escambia County, houses the state’s execution chamber and has been the site of every Alabama lethal injection for years. The midazolam question at the center of the stay-and-challenge cycle in this case has recurred across multiple executions: the drug, a sedative intended as the first of three chemicals, has drawn court challenges nationally over whether it reliably renders an inmate unconscious before the paralytic and cardiac drugs follow.
The two-executions-in-two-weeks pace reflected a period of renewed activity in Alabama’s capital punishment system after stretches in which legal challenges, drug availability questions and litigation over protocols had slowed the schedule. Death penalty cases of Melson’s vintage — crimes from the 1990s worked through more than two decades of direct appeals, state post-conviction review and federal habeas corpus — illustrate why the interval between sentence and execution has grown so long even as the state has accelerated its calendar once the appellate path is exhausted.
What Remains
For Gadsden, the case’s conclusion closed a chapter that had run longer than the working lives of some of the young people employed at the restaurant where the killings occurred. For the surviving employee and the victims’ relatives, the statement read by the prisons commissioner captured their position after 23 years of appeals. For state policymakers, Brewbaker’s call for integrity review ensured the case would be cited in the ongoing debate over how Alabama administers its death penalty — a debate that the 182 inmates still on death row keep current regardless of how any single execution resolves.
The Execution as Witnessed
The sequence of events inside the chamber — the warrant read at 9:54 p.m., the shaking for roughly a minute after the injection began, the consciousness checks at 10:03 p.m., breathing stopped by 10:07 p.m., death confirmed at 10:27 p.m. — is the record that media witnesses are required to preserve, and it becomes the public’s only account of how the state’s protocol actually operated in a given case. The shaking witnesses observed will be weighed against the midazolam litigation that produced the evening’s delayed start: defense arguments that the sedative may fail to keep an inmate unconscious describe precisely the kind of movement witnesses reported.
The four-hour gap between the scheduled 6 p.m. time and the procedure’s start also illustrated how execution nights unfold in practice — a stay issued, attorneys filing, justices reviewing, then the stay lifted without comment and the process resuming within the hour. For the relatives waiting on behalf of the victims and the attorneys pursuing the challenge, the same hours carried opposite meanings.
Midazolam and the National Legal Fight
The challenge Melson’s attorneys mounted — attacking midazolam as the first drug in the state’s three-drug sequence — was not new to the courts. The same argument has produced stays, hearings and rulings in states across the country that use the sedative, and Alabama’s December 2016 execution of Ronald Bert Smith became the reference point Alabama opponents cite: a condemned inmate who coughed and heaved for roughly 13 minutes after the drug was administered.
Whether a protocol using midazolam satisfies the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment remains the live question in the litigation that continues statewide. Each execution that proceeds — and each episode witnesses describe afterward — feeds the record on which the next challenge is built, making the chamber’s minutes part of a legal argument that no single case settles.