Matthew Reeves is scheduled for execution in Alabama on January 27, 2022 for the 1998 murder of Willie Johnson.

NOTE: On January 7, 2022, a federal judge issued an injunction that should postpone this execution by allowing Reeves to wait until Alabama's gas chamber is ready and allowed to be used. This order is based on the fact that Reeves is too intellectually disabled to have signed up to be gassed rather than injected when prison guards passed out the form.

Reeves was 18 years old at the time of the crime. A neuropsychologist determined that he “has significant deficits in multiple areas of adaptive functioning” and because those deficits appeared before age 18, it was concluded that Reeves is intellectually disabled. This information was never presented at trial.

In scheduling executions such as this, Alabama makes itself an outlier in its use of the death penalty. The majority of other states are on a downward trend of executions, and increasingly, states are abolishing the practice altogether, including the southern state of Virginia, which repealed its death penalty law in Spring 2021.

Please sign the petition asking the Governor to do everything in her power to ensure Reeves does not face execution and to seek a path to clemency in the case.