Terryln Hall was just 6 years old when her mother, Faith, was fatally shot by a former boyfriend. Now, nearly 30 years later, Hall and her sister—along with their uncle—oppose Alabama’s plan to execute the man who killed their mother, the AP reports. Unless a judge or the governor intervenes, Joe Nathan James Jr., 49, will die by lethal injection Thursday evening at a south Alabama prison. “We thought about it and prayed about it, and we found it in ourselves to forgive him for what he did. We really wish there was something that we could do to stop it,” Hall said in a telephone interview with the AP. State Rep. Juandalynn Givan sent a letter to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey relaying the family’s request to stop the execution.
Faith Hall briefly dated James, but he became obsessed with her, prosecutors said. On Aug. 15, 1994, he forced his way inside an apartment, pulled a gun from his waistband and shot her three times. A Jefferson County jury convicted James of capital murder in 1996 and voted to recommend the death penalty, which a judge imposed. The conviction was overturned when the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that a judge wrongly admitted some police reports into evidence. James was retried and again sentenced to death in 1999, when jurors rejected defense claims that he was under emotional duress at the time of the shooting. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied James' request for a stay of execution Tuesday.
Faith Hall was 26 when she died, leaving behind two young daughters. Six-year-old Terryln Hall struggled to understand what had happened to her mother. Hall said her only real memory of her mother is as a hard worker who took care of her daughters and “whoever else was around.” "He took a big piece of us away, a big piece of our heart away,” she said. The road to forgiveness was a long process for Hall. “I did hate him. I did. And I know hate is such a strong feeling word, but I really did have hate in my heart. As I got older and realized, you can’t walk around with hate in your heart. You still got to live. And once I had kids of my own, you know, I can’t pass it down to my kids and have them walk around with hate in their hearts,” she said. Alabama's AG wants the execution to proceed, and there's no word yet what Ivey plans to do.
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