Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey expected to answer questions about 2020 Census on Thursday. Instead, she was confronted by the Pamela Woods, the sister of Nathaniel Woods, who was executed by the state on March 5 for the murder of three police officers.
Video from WAFF TV shows Woods calmly walking up to the governor as Ivey was answering a question for a reporter.
“You killed my brother,” she said. “Gov. Ivey, you killed my brother.”
Ivey had no response, and let herself be led away by her team.
“He’s an innocent man and you killed him,” Woods called after her.
Nathaniel Woods was sentenced to death in 2005 for his role in the killing of three Birmingham cops: Carlos “Curly” Owen, Harley Chisholm III, and Charles Bennett. Woods didn’t pull the trigger, a fact not disputed by the prosecution or Woods’ defense. But that doesn’t matter in Alabama, where accomplices to murder can not only receive murder convictions, but be sentenced to death.
Prosecutors accused Woods of conspiring to kill the officers, luring them into the home he and his friend, Kerry Spencer, were in. Spencer and Woods’ legal teams say the cops were attempting to collect money from a known drug dealer in the neighborhood, and that Spencer shot the officers in self-defense.
Spencer, who is appealing his death sentence, has always claimed Woods was innocent.
Some politicians and activists publicly called for Ivey to stop the execution, but the governor’s office claimed there wasn’t sufficient evidence to release Woods.
Pamela Woods, speaking to reporters after the confrontation, said Alabama wanted “revenge” for the cop killings.
“He’s not a killer. He didn’t plan anything,” she continued. “He had bad legal counsel. That’s the only thing that went wrong in his case.”
“These were dirty cops, everyone in Ensley knows this, everyone knows this,” she said. “So why? Why execute an innocent man?”