In Alabama, a Volunteer to Die

James Osgood has been executed by the State of Alabama. Read an eyewitness account.

There were no protestors today on the side of Highway 21 in Atmore, Alabama, outside Holman Correctional Facility where the state would soon begin its execution of James Osgood.

Instead, under a cloudy spring sky, a few guard trucks were parked at the prison’s first gate, lonely in the grassy plains.

Before, at the state’s previous killings, protestors have often flanked the roadside nearest those trucks, their dissenting bodies one of the few signals in the landscape of the death about to occur inside the prison’s gates.

But this time, at the request of Osgood, there were to be no protests. No protestors. No rallies calling for mercy. No attempts to save his life, however futile in this Deep South state.

Inside the prison, those Alabamians incarcerated on death row were already on lockdown in preparation for the lethal injection of their friend.

Osgood had given one of them some of his essentials—clothes, food and some hygiene products—and told him that he trusted the man to distribute them fairly to others in Holman after he was gone.

“I was honored,” the man told Tread.

Those men, the more than 150 of them housed on the row, had vigils Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, he said, before lockdown began. The vigils were “focused on the individual relationship with God, grace, forgiveness—and solidarity.”

“Beautiful and inspiring words were spoken, and since there is no attempts at stopping the execution, the focus was on the strength and healing we all rely on to get us through,” he said.

Osgood was convicted more than a decade ago of the 2010 murder of Tracy Lynn Brown, a Chilton County woman. His initial death sentence was overturned because an error in the instructions given to the jury limited their ability to consider mitigating evidence, including a significant and documented history of Osgood’s abuse as a child, in their consideration of whether the state should put the man to death.

Osgood was deep into research of his family tree, one of the men on the row told Tread in the days before Thursday evening’s execution.

“Osgood is an interesting guy,” he said in part. “He and a group of friends started a Dungeons and Dragons game [in Holman].”

Those around him said Osgood felt deeply guilty, to the point that he believed his death is required to make up for what he did.

Osgood dropped his appeals in recent years and asked a judge to allow him to die.

“I can't judge him for making the decision he made,” the man on death row told Tread. “It's his life, and from what I can tell it's always been a rough one.”

Asked about how those living on the row are processing Osgood’s request to die, the man on death row said many of them are focusing on forgiveness.

“Most guys here struggle with forgiving themselves, and I have as well,” he said. “But we forgive people for them and for us, and when we forgive ourselves, it's going to benefit everyone. We walk free from the guilt and shame and can care for others better, not held back by our past, but looking forward with a hope, not just for us, but all who we can encourage and uplift.”

Osgood’s execution “will likely not make many waves,” he said, and is unlikely to change public opinion about the death penalty in Alabama, “but it’s always sad to have guys lose hope.”

Osgood isn’t the first person in recent Alabama history to volunteer for execution. Derrick Dearman, convicted of a 2016 murder, had similarly dropped his appeals ahead of his execution.

Some state officials have applauded condemned individuals’ decisions to volunteer for executions. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said that Dearman’s decision to drop his appeals “was appropriate.”

The individual on the row interviewed by Tread said that he worries about the influence Dearman’s desire to have the state kill him had on other incarcerated men’s mental health.

“Suicide is contagious, and Dearman influenced Osgood,” he said.

Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery nonprofit, recently outlined how Osgood’s past may have also contributed to suicidal tendencies later in life.

“DHR records document the abandonment, neglect, and abuse he endured from birth until he was discharged from the system at 17. His adoptive mother took James and his sister to bars and left them alone with strangers, resulting in James being sexually abused and witnessing the sexual abuse of his sister. James had to save his sister when their adoptive mother tried to drown her in the bathtub,” according to EJI.

“In part because of this childhood trauma, James has struggled with suicidal tendencies. At about 12, DHR documented James as ‘depressed and distraught.’ In 1985, at about 17, he sent his caseworker a letter that ‘indicated suicidal tendencies.’ James attempted suicide in 1997,” the legal nonprofit wrote of Osgood.

The Death Penalty Information center published an analysis earlier this year that concluded that of the 165 peo­ple exe­cut­ed at their own request since 1977, 87% bat­tled men­tal ill­ness, sub­stance abuse, or both.

The man on Alabama’s death row who spoke with Tread confirmed some of those dynamics.

“There's a couple of other guys who see death as an escape, so I'm praying—and trying to be a good friend—for those guys,” he said.

STAY SEATED AND QUIET: An eyewitness account of the execution of James Osgood

The curtain, as usual, was closed when the five media witnesses entered one of three viewing rooms just outside Holman’s death chamber. Above the window, a familiar reminder in all caps, stamped onto a license plate by a person incarcerated at the rural Alabama institution: “STAY SEATED AND QUIET.”

As the press entered, witnesses for the condemned—family members and a lawyer—shuffled seats, moving toward the front of the room. Soon, all of the witnesses were seated in the padded office chairs pointed toward the viewing glass, reflecting the pained expressions of Osgood’s witnesses back to the rest of the room.

“Raisin’ Hell,” one of their shirts said.

The woman’s face was scrunched—pained—her eyes closed as she took slow, deep intentional breaths, preparing herself for the curtain to open.

Soon, around 6:09, correctional officers pulled back the light blue curtains of the state’s grim stage, revealing Osgood laid on his back, straps over his body, arms out in crucifix, an IV entering the inside of his left elbow. The arm was red and appeared bruised, a speck of blood visible even from the witness room’s back row.

Later, following the execution, Alabama’s prisons commissioner would confirm that the state’s execution team had stuck Osgood five times—four times in one arm and once in the other—before gaining vein access. The commissioner blamed “vein damage” as the reason multiple sticks had been required, though he did not specify how the damage had occurred.

Within a few moments, Holman’s warden took the mic and began the process of reading Osgood’s death warrant.

“Signed by Governor Kay Ivey,” he finished. Then, quickly: “Do you have any last words?”

The warden pushed the microphone into Osgood’s face. Osgood took a moment, and the warden began to pull away. But Osgood was ready. He looked at the warden and made it clear: he would speak.

“I have not said her name since that day,” he said of Tracy Brown, his victim. “I felt like it wasn’t my right to.”

But over time, he explained, he began to believe not saying her name was more disrespectful.

“Today will be the first day I say her name,” he said. “Tracy, I apologize.”

The warden took away the wired microphone, hanging it back in its place against the back wall, next to the IV lines routed from backstage. He left the room, leaving just the members of the execution team to do their deadly work.

As the execution procedure began around 6:12, Osgood began cycling through numbers with the fingers of his left hand. One finger, then four, then three. I. Love. You.

One of Osgood’s witnesses openly wailed.

He began to breath through his mouth, but he continued cycling through the numbers with his fingers. One, four, three. One, four, three.

By 6:14, it had already become more difficult for Osgood to continue the pattern. His breathing soon became more labored. His eyes remained open.

Osgood’s witnesses soon became concerned about one of their loved ones beside them in the front row of the witness room. Her sobs had become more quiet and her breathing labored, too.

“You’ve gotta breathe,” one of her loved ones told her. The lawyer, Alison Mollman, who represented Osgood for years, reached out her hand and placed it on the struggling relative’s back. She wouldn’t move it for the rest of the execution.

Around 6:15, Osgood head fell back and his labored breathing continued. His eyes remain at least partially open.

Within a few moments, a walkie talkie squeaked in the distance and one of the prison guards— a man who’d been uniformed in previous executions, but who now wore a suit—proceeded with a consciousness check.

“Inmate Osgood,” he yelled in the man’s face. “Inmate Osgood.”

The tail of the guard’s suit was stuck in his pants.

The guard pinched Osgood’s skin on the inside of his arm, not far from where the IV line entered his body.

By around 6:18, Osgood had stopped moving. One finger remained extended, his hand still trying to relay his message, even as he died. I. Love. You. The guards still flanked the man, their hands linked together in front of them, theirs eyes locked into the distance.

Then, for several minutes, as Osgood laid motionless on the gurney before us, the witnesses in the room sat silent and still, just as the license plate sign above us had demanded.

The curtain closed at 6:25 p.m.

Osgood was declared dead by a physician around 6:35, according to a corrections official.

“He made mistakes, terrible ones that he regretted until his dying day, but he didn’t make excuses for his actions,” Mollman said in a statment. “He was accountable and he was sincere.”

The View from the Row

As the execution proceeded a stone’s throw away, the man living on the row was looking out his window, over the prison yard toward the door where he knew Osgood’s body would soon exit, barring another botched execution attempt by the State of Alabama. He’d seen it all before.

On Thursday evening, he saw it all again.

“Watching them load him into the coroner’s van now,” he told Tread, the familiar process beginning at the prison door below him. “I hope he’s received in heaven with a little more gentleness than he got from us, the system, society, and the coroner just now.”

He remembered how staff had had difficulty maneuvering the body of the person they’d just killed after they had executed Demetrius Frazier in February.

“Tonight it was just the slamming him around that I noticed,” he said.

In the end, the man said he feels guilty that he couldn’t do more to make Osgood feel like life was worth living, even in the confines of the state.

“I know there’s only so much I could do, but I definitely failed him and society failed him, and he failed himself,” he said. “It’s just sad that we can’t do better than that for each other.”