John Evans's electrocution at Holman Prison lasted fourteen minutes, through three jolts of electricity and repeated examinations that found him still alive. The execution exposed the physical violence behind the state's formal procedure of death and became the story Walter McMillian heard again and again when he arrived on Alabama's death row.

Setting and Witnesses

Holman's electric chair, the instrument used in the execution, was a large wooden chair built in the 1930s. Inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes; prisoners called it Yellow Mama. Executions at Holman had resumed only a few years before Evans's death. John Evans and Arthur Jones had both recently been electrocuted, making the execution chamber a present, rather than distant, reality for condemned prisoners.

Attorney Russ Canan, who worked with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans had also recorded a film intended as an after-school special: in it, he told schoolchildren about his life and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. After the courts refused, through multiple appeals, to block the execution, Canan went to Holman at Evans's request to witness it. His presence would make him not only an observer but the author of an affidavit describing what the state's procedure actually did to a human body.

The Execution

At 8:30 p.m., a current of 1,900 volts passed through Evans for thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted from the electrode strapped to his left leg. His body slammed against the restraints, and one fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst free from its strap. Smoke and sparks poured from beneath the hood covering his face, while the witness room filled with the overpowering smell of burning flesh and clothing. Two doctors examined Evans and declared that he was not dead.

The electrode was fastened again. After a second thirty-second jolt, smoke rose once more from Evans's leg and head. The doctors checked him again and reported that his heart was still beating: he was alive. The repetition made the failure unmistakable. This was not a single malfunction concealed by an orderly process, but an execution continuing after medical examination had confirmed that its intended outcome had not occurred.

Canan asked the prison commissioner, who was speaking to Governor George Wallace on an open telephone line, to grant clemency on the grounds that Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request was denied. At 8:40 p.m., a third thirty-second charge passed through Evans's body. At 8:44, doctors pronounced him dead. From the first jolt to that declaration, fourteen minutes had elapsed.

Record, Protest, and Aftermath

Canan later filed an affidavit describing the sequence in detail. The account preserves the elements a summary of an execution might smooth away: the electrode coming loose, the doctors finding a pulse, the request for clemency, and the state's refusal to stop. The official purpose was to carry out a death sentence; the witnessed process instead made visible a body that did not die when the state tried to kill it. The affidavit therefore serves as both a record of what happened and a challenge to the abstraction of execution as a controlled legal act.

The episode also belongs to a larger history of punishment and racial terror. In the book's account, lynching helped create the modern death penalty: speedy executions partly redirected the violence of lynching while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. That historical interpretation does not establish the circumstances of Evans's individual case; it places the execution within a system whose racial history cannot be separated from its claims of lawful punishment. The wider context included a death row where most of Alabama's condemned prisoners since capital punishment returned in 1975 were Black, though nearly 40 percent were white, and all were poor. In the South, racial exclusion from juries also persisted despite repeated legal prohibitions, with discretionary strikes continuing to remove Black prospective jurors. These conditions give the execution's state authority a broader social setting without making the details of Evans's electrocution stand in for every case.

What Walter Heard on Death Row

Walter McMillian arrived at Holman about ten years after the modern death penalty had been reinstated. He knew nothing of Evans's electrocution before entering the prison. But another execution was approaching, and the condemned men spoke constantly about the electric chair. For McMillian's first three weeks on Alabama's death row, Evans's execution was almost all he heard about.

That repetition linked a particular past event to the fear of what might come next. McMillian had believed that officials would confirm his alibi and release him within days; instead, the weeks passed and despair deepened. Against that expectation of release, the account of Evans's death made the threat of execution concrete—not merely a sentence on paper, but a procedure that could continue through multiple shocks, even after doctors found a living man. The event thus entered McMillian's experience of death row before he knew its history, giving the prison's central instrument a name, a record, and a terrifying human consequence.