“It’s a contradiction that I always observed,” said Hannah Cox, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, an advocacy group.
Approving of executions, Cox said, is “a stance that cheapens the pro-life argument.”
Cox, who is originally from Alabama and opposes both abortion and the death penalty, said that more conservatives were coming to feel the same way, offering as evidence Republican-sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty that have been introduced in 11 state legislatures.
Michael Brandon Samra was executed by lethal injection Thursday evening, according to Alabama Attorney General Steven T. Marshall.
This photo provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Michael Brandon Samra. Source: Alabama Department of Corrections
Samra and a friend, Mark Duke, were convicted in 1997 of killing four people - Duke’s father, the father’s girlfriend and the girlfriend’s two young daughters - after a dispute over a pickup truck.
Both defendants were sentenced to death, but Duke’s sentence was later overturned because he was 16 at the time of the killings; Samra was 19.
Though the timing was coincidental, the actions taken by Alabama on consecutive days served to highlight widely held positions on the political right that some people say are in conflict, with protecting human life held paramount in one context but not another.
Governor Kay Ivey, who declined to halt the scheduled execution, has expressed some discomfort with her role in the death penalty.
Early in her tenure, she said she did not “relish the responsibility that I hold” in capital cases.
Even so, Ivey has not used her authority under the state constitution to reprieve or commute any death sentence since she took office in April 2017; the state has now executed seven people during her tenure.
Gov. Kay Ivey said she would allow the scheduled execution of a convicted murderer to go ahead, a day after she signed into law a near-total ban on abortions. Source: Blake Paterson/Associated Press
“Alabama will not stand for the loss of life in our state, and with this heinous crime, we must respond with punishment,” Ivey said in a statement after Samra was put to death.
“These four victims deserved a future, and Mr Samra took that opportunity away from them and did so with no sense of remorse.
"This evening justice has been delivered to the loved ones of these victims, and it signals that Alabama does not tolerate murderous acts of any nature.”
By Adeel Hassan and Alan Blinder © 2019 The New York Times
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