John Evans

John Evans was a condemned prisoner at Holman Prison whose electrocution exposed the physical violence concealed by the formal language of execution. After courts rejected efforts to stop his death, Evans asked his attorney, Russ Canan, to witness it. Canan later described three jolts of electricity, repeated medical examinations confirming that Evans remained alive, and a denied plea for clemency. Evans’s death took fourteen minutes; for the newly arrived Walter McMillian, the account became the overwhelming subject of his first weeks on Alabama’s death row.

Identity and Circumstances

Evans was among the prisoners executed after Alabama resumed capital punishment in the modern era. His execution took place at Holman Prison, where the electric chair was known to inmates as “Yellow Mama”: a large wooden chair built in the 1930s, painted yellow by prisoners, and fitted with leather straps and electrodes. By the time Walter McMillian arrived, Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted there. The chair was not an incidental fixture in prison life. At Holman, condemned men lived with its presence and with the knowledge that executions had begun again only a few years earlier.

Evans’s documented life in the evidence is bounded by his imprisonment, his efforts to speak to young people, and the execution itself. The account gives no fuller biographical history, but it does record an effort to make his experience useful beyond the prison walls. He appeared in a filmed after-school special for children, told schoolchildren the story of his life, and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. That public address sits in sharp contrast to the final event associated with him: a death administered by the state despite repeated appeals and an attorney’s attempt to halt it.

His Appeal to Young People

Before his execution, Evans shared his life story with schoolchildren through the filmed program. The account does not specify the mistakes he discussed, or describe the children’s response; it establishes instead the purpose of his appeal. Evans urged them to avoid the errors he believed had shaped his life. In that appearance, he was not only a prisoner awaiting execution but also a speaker attempting to turn personal experience into a warning for an audience outside prison.

The program’s after-school setting makes that effort particularly distinct from the prison’s other forms of communication. Evans addressed children in a format intended for them, while the institution around him prepared to carry out his execution. The contrast does not erase the gravity of his sentence or supply details the account does not provide about his past. It does show that the narrative preserves Evans as someone who spoke about the life preceding his death, rather than only as the body placed in the chair.

Execution at Holman

After multiple appeals failed to block the execution, Evans asked Canan to attend as a witness. Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, went to the prison. His later affidavit described an execution that did not end with the first application of electricity. At 8:30 p.m., a charge of 1,900 volts passed through Evans’s body for thirty seconds. Sparks and flames came from the electrode attached to his left leg; his body struck the restraints, and his fist clenched. Smoke emerged from beneath the hood covering his face, and the smell of burning flesh and clothing spread into the witness room.

Doctors examined Evans and declared that he was not dead. The electrode on his left leg was fastened again, and he received a second thirty-second jolt. The doctors checked him once more and reported that his heart was still beating: he remained alive. The process therefore continued after the first attempt had visibly failed to kill him. Its repeated sequence—electricity, examination, confirmation of life—made the execution’s duration and physical toll central to Canan’s account.

Canan asked the prison commissioner, who was speaking to Governor George Wallace over an open telephone line, to grant clemency because Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request was denied. At 8:40 p.m., Evans received a third thirty-second charge; at 8:44, doctors pronounced him dead. From the first jolt to the pronouncement, the execution lasted fourteen minutes. The account’s precise times and repeated medical findings make the death not a single instantaneous act but a prolonged process in which the failure of each preceding jolt was confirmed before another was delivered.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Walter McMillian knew nothing of Evans’s execution before arriving at Holman. In the prison, however, another execution was approaching, and the condemned men spoke constantly about the electric chair. For McMillian’s first three weeks on death row, Evans’s execution was almost all he heard about. Evans thus entered McMillian’s story not through a personal relationship between the two men, but through the prison’s circulating account of what awaited those condemned there.

That encounter links the chair’s physical reality to McMillian’s new understanding of his own confinement. Before his arrest, McMillian had believed officials would check his family’s account of his alibi and release him within days. As the days became weeks, he sank into despair; now he occupied the same death-row environment where Evans’s prolonged execution remained immediate in conversation. Evans’s death consequently functions as more than background information about Holman. It gives concrete meaning to the threat hanging over the men housed there and helps explain why the electric chair dominated their talk. The man who had urged children to avoid the mistakes of his life was remembered on the unit through the state’s final, excruciating procedure.