Governor Spares Death-Row Inmate Who Didn’t Kill Anyone
This 2025 photo provided by Matt Schulz shows Charles "Sonny" Burton at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala. (Matt Schulz via AP, File)
Alabama’s governor has stopped an execution just two days before it was scheduled to take place, pointing to what she called a troubling disparity between the gunman in a case and a co-defendant who never fired a shot.
On Tuesday, Gov. Kay Ivey commuted Charles Lee “Sonny” Burton’s death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, canceling his planned nitrogen hypoxia execution for the 1991 killing of AutoZone customer Doug Battle in Talladega, according to the New York Times.
Ivey, who has long supported capital punishment, said she could not allow the execution to move forward because the man who actually fired the fatal shot, Derrick DeBruce, is serving life without parole after winning an appeal. Burton was the only co-defendant still facing execution.
“Charles Burton did not shoot the victim, did not direct the triggerman to shoot the victim and had already left the store by the time the shooting occurred,” the Republican governor said in a statement. Despite that, Burton had been scheduled to die while DeBruce remained in prison serving a life sentence.
Burton, now 75, will serve the same life-without-parole sentence as DeBruce.
The commutation came after weeks of appeals from former jurors, faith leaders, and Battle’s daughter. In a letter to the governor last November, Tori Battle said she questioned the fairness of executing an elderly man who never pulled the trigger. She wrote that it disturbed her to think of someone at Burton’s age being put to death when, with a stronger defense, he might never have ended up on death row.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall criticized the decision, telling NBC News there has “never been any doubt that Sonny Burton has Douglas Battle’s blood on his hands.”
“Burton does not deserve special treatment because he is old—he could have been executed a long time ago, but like many death-row inmates, he chose to drag out his case through endless frivolous appeals,” Marshall said.
It is only the second commutation Ivey has granted in nearly nine years as governor. In 2025 she spared Rocky Myers, citing doubts about his guilt. There was no forensic evidence tying Myers to the 1991 murder he was convicted of, and the trial judge overrode a jury recommendation for a life sentence and imposed the death penalty instead, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Myers became the first Alabama death row inmate granted clemency since 1999.
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