the Southern District of Alabama for a writ of habeas corpus. The application requested the Court find Evans's conviction unconstitutional because consideration of lesser included offenses was not offered to the jury. The District Court dismissed her application on the grounds that she was not entitled to act as "next friend". She appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which overturned the District Court's decision and, in fact, judged the initial criminal conviction to be invalid. In 1982, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the state's petition for a writ of certiorari, reversing the judgment of the Court of Appeals and returning to them the decision on the constitutionality of Evans's sentence. This finding was made with two of the justices (William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall) entering an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, because they accepted the argument of the State of Alabama on the matter in question, but held that capital punishment itself was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. In July that year, Evans fired his lawyers and filed a motion to dismiss all further appeals. The Court of Appeals accepted his motion on October 19, 1982. The Alabama Supreme Court rejected a subsequent application for a new sentencing hearing on February 18, 1983, and execution was carried out at Holman Correctional Facility, near Atmore, Alabama, on April 22. Execution The execution is notable for its imprecision. The means of carrying out the sentence of death used at Holman Prison was an electric chair constructed by an inmate in 1927. The chair was nicknamed "Yellow Mama" because of its traffic-yellow coat of paint. It had not been used since 1965, after which a series of Supreme Court decisions created an effective moratorium on executions in the United States until the constitutionality of the death penalty was affirmed by the Court in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). The execution was witnessed by reporter Mark Harris, who wrote this first-person account for United Press International published on May 4, 1983. The following description of Evans's electrocution was sworn by Evans's attorney, Russell F. Canan, on June 22, 1983: Shortly before his execution, Evans was featured in an After School Special called "Dead Wrong" in which he shared his life story with young people and pleaded for them not