Supreme Court stays execution of Alabama man convicted in murder-for-hire scheme

The U.S. Supreme Court has stayed the execution of an Alabama inmate convicted in a 1982 murder-for-hire.

The court on Thursday night stayed the execution of Tommy Arthur without comment until further order of the court.

Arthur, 74, had been scheduled to be executed Thursday night by lethal injection at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.

Prison system spokesman Bob Horton said the state would wait until Arthur’s death warrant expired at midnight to determine whether the execution can proceed.

Arthur was convicted of killing Troy Wicker with a gunshot through the eye as Wicker slept inside his Muscle Shoals home.

Wicker’s wife initially said she had been raped and an intruder killed her husband, but she later testified she had sex with Arthur and paid him $10,000 to kill her husband. She also testified that Arthur, who is white, wore a wig and makeup to disguise himself as an African American man when he shot her husband.

The execution was scheduled after years of appeals for Arthur, who once asked a jury to give him the death penalty but has avoided it for decades.

Juries twice convicted Arthur, but those convictions were overturned on appeal. During his third trial in 1991, Arthur ignored the advice of his attorneys and asked the jury to sentence him to death. He said at the time that he didn’t have a death wish, but it was a way of opening more avenues of appeal.

The Alabama Supreme Court has previously set six execution dates for Arthur, but he won reprieves each time. The Alabama attorney general’s office in July asked the court to set an “expedited seventh execution date” after a federal judge dismissed Arthur’s most recent challenge to state death penalty procedures.

Arthur, who has maintained his innocence, sent Gov. Robert J. Bentley a four-page handwritten letter asking for an execution stay, arguing that he hadn’t had a fair trial and that potential DNA evidence had not been reviewed.

Arthur’s attorneys argued that he was sentenced under a legal structure similar to one that was ruled unconstitutional in Florida because it put too much power in the hands of judges. A judge sentenced Arthur to die after a jury recommended the death sentence by an 11-1 vote.

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that there were enough differences from Florida’s system to make Alabama’s sentencing method constitutional.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday refused to stay the execution after Arthur challenged Alabama’s death penalty procedure as unconstitutional.

UPDATES:

8:10 p.m.: This article was updated with details about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to stay the execution.

This article was originally published at 11:20 a.m.