John Louis Evans III (January 4, 1950 – April 22, 1983) was the first inmate to be executed by the state of Alabama after the United States reinstituted the death penalty in 1976. The manner of his execution is frequently cited by opponents of capital punishment in the United States. Evans was born in Beaumont, Texas, and was executed at the Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore, Alabama, at the age of 33. Conviction and sentencing After his 1976 parole from an Indiana prison, Evans and fellow convict Wayne Ritter (January 30, 1954 – August 28, 1987) embarked on a two-month-long crime spree involving, by Evans's own admission, over thirty armed robberies, nine kidnappings, and two extortion schemes across seven states. On January 5, 1977, he and Ritter robbed and killed Edward Nassar, a pawn shop owner in Mobile, Alabama, while his two young daughters were in the store. The perpetrators fled but were captured on March 7 by FBI agents in Little Rock, Arkansas. The evidence recovered was the gun used to shoot Nassar in the back and another gun stolen from the pawn shop. Although he gave a detailed confession, prosecutors refused to accept his plea of guilty because they wanted Evans sentenced to death, and under Alabama law, this is only allowed following a conviction by a jury. Evans was tried in State Circuit Court in Mobile, Alabama on April 26, 1977, for first-degree murder committed during the commission of a robbery. During the trial, Evans again admitted to his crime and stated that he did not feel remorse and that under the same circumstances, he would kill again. Furthermore, he threatened that if the jury did not sentence him to death, he would escape and murder each of them. Despite his testimony, the jury was instructed to consider all the evidence and return a guilty verdict only if the prosecutors had left no reasonable doubt. After less than fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted Evans of the capital offense charged, thus imposing the death penalty. Under Alabama law, all capital sentences must be affirmed by review in a higher court. The sentence of death was confirmed by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and by the Alabama Supreme Court, which set the date of April 6, 1979, for his execution. On April 2, Evans's mother, Betty, acting as "next friend", petitioned the U.S. District Court for