Charles “Sonny“ Burton is set to be executed in Alabama for participating in a robbery in which his accomplice fatally shot a man.
jail. His last journey will be to an execution chamber where he will breath nitrogen gas through a mask until, deprived of oxygen, he will suffocate and die. Its an execution method that has been Burton's punishment stems from a robbery he participated in over 30 years ago in which a man was shot and killed by one of Burton's accomplices.
Burton did not kill the man, nor was he in the store when the shooting took place. But he was sentenced on felony murder charges, which apply when someone is killed while a felony is being carried out, even if they did not personally commit the killing. Theand spares him from death. This is something Burton, legal experts, jurors in his original case and the daughter of the man who was killed in the robbery are all hoping for."I ain’t no perfect person. But I ain’t killed nobody, I ain’t told nobody to kill nobody, I didn’t even see it happen and if I had been there, I’d have tried to stop it. But I know I have to pay a penalty, and I have and I will. I know I ain’t gettin’ out. But I do hope and pray that the Governor will spare my life and grant me clemency.”The death penalty, legal in 27 states, has long been one of the most contentious instruments of the justice system.according to the Death Penalty Information Center. By November 2025, this figure increased to 47. Alabama, which has one of theBurton's crime was linked to armed robbery. On August 16, 1991, Burton and five other men walked into an AutoZone store in Talladega, Alabama with a gun."One of the guys said they had a lot of money at AutoZone stores in their safes," he told"I went in first to check it out. I bought a couple things I actually needed, and was going to go use the bathroom. I hadn’t even decided to do anything, but when I come out, the other guys were already saying, 'This is a holdup. Everybody get down.'” Burton forced the store's manager to open a safe. He took the money and left the store."I admit I had a gun on me, but I ain’t intend to use it," he said. After Burton had left the store and went to his car, one of his accomplices Derrick DeBruce started arguing with Doug Battle, a 34-year-old man who had entered the store. The fight proved fatal for Battle who DeBruce shot. "I didn’t even know anybody was shot till DeBruce told me he had shot a guy after we left the store," Burton said."I was so mad. He said the guy wouldn’t sit down, so he shot him in the ass. I was so angry at him. I learned the next day the poor man had died, and I felt terrible. I just feel so awful that something like that happened as part of something I did." DeBruce's firearm was discharged in 1991 but it may now prove indirectly responsible for Burton's death some three decades later, long after the smoke from the bullet has long dissipated. In April 1992, Burton was convicted of felony murder and a jury recommended the death penalty, with prosecutors citing testimony alleging that Burton said he would take care of any trouble in the store before the robbery and argued that he acted as the robbery leader. Burton disputes this account. The other individuals involved in the case, conversely, were ultimately spared death. In May 1992 Willie Brantley and Andre Jones pleaded guilty to murder and were sentenced to life with parole. Brantley remains in prison while Jones died in 2022 from pulmonary disease. Deon Long and Lujuan McCants pleaded guilty to murder robbery in the first degree and were sentenced to 25 years. Long died in 2009 by homicide and McCants was released after 15 years, before being resented to jail in Michigan for an unrelated offense. While he was initially sentenced to death too, in September 22, 2015, DeBruce was resentenced to life without parole. The Equal Justice Initiativethis was because an appeals court found that his lawyer was inadequate. He died in December 2020. It is this aspect of the case that has perplexed legal experts who have questioned while Burton is still on death row.“The robotic insistence of the Attorney General on an execution in this case is mindless cruelty," Eric Freedman, a professor of constitutional rights at Hofstra University in New York told"There is a reason the death penalty is steadily losing support on the ground: no matter how good it sounds in theory, all too often it results in outcomes that no ordinary person could support. The best thing Governor Ivey could do to prop up Alabama’s floundering capital punishment system would be to commute Mr. Burton’s sentence.” "Supreme Court rulings limit criminal liability for accomplices in crimes such as armed robbery that are death eligible to those who were ‘major participants’ in the crime," added Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law with expertise in crime at Columbia Law School in New York. "From the account in this case, it is a stretch to call the non-shooter driver as a major participant. Had Mr. Burton been involved in planning the crime and was aware of the risks that someone could die, then a felony murder conviction would be plausible. But that does not seem to be the case, given the deal that the actual killer received. More important, his death sentence is disproportionate to the recent of the actual killer, suggesting arbitrariness and caprice in Burton’s death sentence."Hadar Aviram, a professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco said"overturning the death penalty in this case is fair." "The death penalty often creates scenarios that defy justice, fairness, and common sense, such as this one," Aviram, who specializes in criminal justice and civil rights, said. She added that Burton left the store before the shooting took place and that"raises a serious concern about the extent to which Burton's involvement in the shooting can be said to be active enough to merit the death penalty for it." She added that the death penalty seemed"especially draconian in light of the fact that DeBruce's death penalty was reversed by a federal appeals court in 2014." "The result is a glaring injustice: the principal faces life without parole while an accomplice who wasn't even present at the scene during the murder faces execution." she said.Others incensed by the case include jurors who previously called for Burton's death sentence and Tori Battle, Doug Battle's daughter. Battle was nine years old when her father was murdered."As a child, I believed justice meant punishment. I hated all six men involved and thought that witnessing executions would bring closure," she wrote in theBut she has since changed her mind and is among those calling on Ivey to commute Burton's sentence."As I have grown older, I have come to understand that justice is not about vengeance. It is about truth, proportionality, and fairness," she wrote. "Today, Mr. Burton is 75 years old, wheelchair-bound, and in poor health, suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis. He is frail and poses no threat. Yet Alabama plans to execute him using nitrogen hypoxia, an untested execution method that would cause him to suffocate while conscious.", six of the eight living members of the jury on the case have said they have no objection to Burton's sentence being changed to life without parole, and three have specifically requested it, arguing they would not have voted for Burton's death in the first place had they known DeBruce would be alleviated of the same sentence.: “Absent intervention from Governor Ivey" the state"will execute a man who not only did not kill anyone, but will execute him even after the shooter resentenced to life without parole." "Even those who hold firmly to the tenet: ‘an eye for an eye’ oppose this execution, as Mr. Burton did not take a life," he said.revealed that while a slim majority, some 52 percent, favor the penalty for people convicted of murder, this proportion has declined from 80 percent in 1994. The 52 percent support level is also the lowest support level since 1972, the pollsters found. Meanwhile, the death penalty issue divides people on partisan lines. Some 81 percent of Republicans support it compared to 32 percent of Democrats.If Ivey grants clemency, it will be the second time the Republican politician has approved such a measure. In March 2025 she commuted the sentence of Robin"Rocky" Myers, who was convicted of capital murder in the 1991 stabbing of Ludie Mae Tucker, to life in prison. Myers has maintained his innocence and Ivey said she was not convinced enough of his guilt to approve his execution. Meanwhile, other GOP colleagues have recently commuted the sentences of individuals on death row. In November 2025, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt granted clemency to Tremane Wood, who was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2004, for his role in the stabbing of Ronnie Wipf during a robbery. Wood has said he had taken part in the robbery but denied stabbing Wipf.If Ivey does not grant clemency, Burton has around a week to get his affairs in order."I’m not scared of death," the devout Muslim told."It’s a part of life, and I believe my life with continue after this one, but I do fear the suffocation. I don’t really know what to expect from it, and I’ve heard so many things.""I do want people to know I’m so very sorry for my role in this, and so so sorry for what happened to Mr. Battle," he said."He didn’t deserve that and neither did his family. It breaks my heart for them and it kills me I can’t do nothing to bring him back to them."
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