Alabama sets sixth execution for 2024

Derrick Dearman, convicted of the 2016 murders of five people outside Citronelle, is scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17, 2024. (Alabama Department of Corrections)

Alabama will attempt to conduct a sixth execution this year, which would tie the state for the most in the past 50 years.

Gov. Kay Ivey Tuesday set an Oct. 17 execution date for Derrick Dearman, 35, who confessed to killing Robert Lee Brown, 26; Chelsea Marie Reed, 22; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; Joseph Adam Turner, 26 and Shannon Melissa Randall, 35, on August 20, 2016. Chelsea Reed was five months pregnant.

The day of the murders, Dearman drove to a house west of Citronelle in Mobile County where his girlfriend had gone to escape him and end their relationship. Dearman killed the five people in the house, then drove his estranged girlfriend and the infant of one of the victims to his father’s house in Mississippi, where he let them go. Dearman later turned himself into the police in Greene County, Mississippi.

Dearman pleaded guilty to the murders in 2018, but a trial took place as required by state law in capital cases. A jury sentenced Dearman to death. The state plans to execute Dearman by lethal injection.

Dearman earlier this year fired his attorneys and wrote to Ivey and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, asking them to set his execution date. He told CNN in April that it was “the only option that would help the victims’ families get the closure they need to move forward.”

“From my point of view, there’s nothing I could ever say or do to make this right,” Dearman said. “I feel like I personally have a debt for the crimes that I committed. That’s the only way that I could ever show that I’m truly remorseful, that I truly do have a conscience.”

Dearman’s execution would be the fifth conducted in 2024 and the sixth to be scheduled. The state executed Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen gas in January. Jamie Ray Mills, executed in May , and Keith Edmund Gavin, executed in July , were both put to death by lethal injection. Alan Eugene Miller is scheduled to be executed by nitrogen gas this month, and Carey Grayson by nitrogen gas in November.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center , Alabama last executed six people in 2011. It also executed six people in 2009. Both were the most for the state since executions resumed in 1983.