Doyle was a convicted murderer and the third death row inmate in America to survive a failed execution. He was set to die by lethal injection for his crime on 22 Feb 2018. His veins were difficult to access on repeated attempts because of prior treatment for Hepatitis C and cancer as well as from his prior intravenous drug use. The execution team abandoned their efforts after three hours and the death warrant expired at midnight.
No further attempt to carry out the death sentence was made and Doyle served a term of life imprisonment that dated back to 1987. His death was attributed to his illnesses.
He had married in 1981 and divorced soon after the birth of their daughter a year or so later. He was thought to have an IQ below 70 and had dropped out of school in the eighth grade.
His arrest on the murder charge was not his first arrest and conviction. The man he killed in Jan 1987 was a Vietnam Veteran working as a motel clerk. Doyle and two accomplices robbed him and then Doyle shot him in the head with a pistol he'd stolen in a robbery committed earlier that day.

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Sep 9 2022, 22:26:23 UTC

From Wikipedia

Doyle Lee Hamm (February 14, 1957 – November 28, 2021) was an American death row inmate in Alabama, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1987 murder of Patrick Cunningham, whom he killed while committing a robbery. While on death row, Hamm developed lymphatic cancer, which made it difficult to impossible to achieve the venous access necessary to administer the drugs used in lethal injections. Despite months of warning by Hamm's attorney and human rights observers and a decades' long legal battle, the Alabama Department of Corrections attempted to execute Hamm on February 22, 2018. The unsuccessful execution attempt lasted nearly three hours and drew international attention. In March 2018, Hamm and the state of Alabama reached a confidential settlement, the terms of which precluded a second execution attempt, giving Hamm a de facto sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, although his sentence was not formally commuted. Hamm remained in prison until his death from cancer-related complications in 2021.

Early life

Hamm was born on February 14, 1957, and grew up in northwest Alabama and was the tenth of twelve children. While he was growing up, Hamm's father and each of his six older brothers spent time in jail. In an interview, one of Hamm's sisters described their childhood home as “constant hell all the time” and recalled that her father told his children that “If you don’t go out and steal, then you’re not a Hamm.” From an early age, Hamm struggled in school. Tests and report cards indicated that, in the fifth grade, Hamm was still reading at a first-grade level. Hamm dropped out of school during the ninth grade and began abusing drugs and alcohol.

At the age of twenty, Hamm was arrested and charged with robbery after a drunken fight in a bar parking lot. Hamm entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to five years in prison. Years later, the alleged victim confessed that no robbery had ever taken place and Hamm's court-appointed attorney admitted that he had been “too busy and overworked to give this case the time and attention it needed.” Hamm was arrested other times for burglary, assault, and grand larceny.

Murder of Patrick Cunningham

On January 24, 1987, Hamm went on a crime spree that culminated in a motel robbery at the Anderson Motel in Cullman, Alabama and the murder of Patrick Cunningham, a nighttime clerk at the motel. $350 was taken from the motel's cash register as well as $60 from Cunningham’s wallet. Cunningham was shot once in the temple with a .38 caliber pistol that had been stolen in a robbery committed by Hamm in Mississippi earlier the same day. On the following day, January 25, 1987 Hamm was arrested in Cullman and charged with capital murder.

Two individuals claiming to be witnesses to the crime initially identified Hamm as the gunman during the robbery, but soon recanted their testimony. Those individuals were later charged as co-defendants and took deals to testify as state witnesses. During questioning, Hamm confessed to committing the robbery.

Attempted execution

On February 20, two days before Hamm's execution was scheduled to take place, Chief Judge Bowdre issued an order allowing the execution to take place. At 12:30 p.m. on February 22, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied Hamm's request for a stay of execution, prompting Hamm's counsel to appeal the decision to the United States Supreme Court.

At 6:00 p.m. on February 22, the Supreme Court issued a temporary stay of execution as it considered Hamm's claims. Almost three hours later, at approximately 8:40 p.m., the Supreme Court lifted the temporary stay and denied Hamm's petition for a stay of execution. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented from the court's denial and noted that the method of execution that Alabama had devised in order to execute Hamm despite his cancer and venous access issues has "never been tried before in Alabama."

During the course of the execution attempt, correctional officers spent two and a half hours inserting needles into Hamm's legs and ankles, trying to get venous access. The execution team turned Hamm on his stomach and slapped the back of his legs in an attempt to find a usable vein. When attempts at peripheral venous access failed, members of the execution team began inserting needles into Hamm's groin in the hopes of finding a vein. During this process, Hamm was stabbed a half-dozen times, with needles puncturing his bladder and penetrating his femoral artery. In the days following the execution attempt, Hamm's urine contained blood as a result of the punctured bladder. During the execution, a large amount of blood accumulated around Hamm's groin, soaking through the pad he was lying on and requiring the execution team to replace it. The large amount of blood led to speculation that the executioner had also punctured Hamm's femoral artery.

When the execution was finally called off, Hamm collapsed as he was removed from the gurney. During a visit with his defense counsel the following day, Hamm was limping and sore and was described by his attorney as “a shadow of himself.” Hamm became only the fourth person in the United States since 1946 to walk out of the execution chamber still alive. In a press conference following the execution attempt, Jeff Dunn, Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, told reporters: "I wouldn’t necessarily characterize what we had tonight as a problem."

The New York Times described the botched execution as "ghoulish proceedings." Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights described the event as "unconscionable," adding that the "attempted execution clearly demonstrates the cruelty and the torture of the death penalty." The editorial board of a local newspaper in Alabama described the attempted execution as "torture in Alabama's death chamber." In a report submitted to the federal court, the doctor who examined Hamm after the attempted execution wrote that, during the execution, Hamm wished for death "because he preferred to die rather than to continue to experience the ongoing severe pain."

Aftermath

On March 5, 2018, Hamm and his attorney filed an amended civil rights lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections. The lawsuit alleged that a second execution attempt would violate Hamm's Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Hamm also alleged that a second execution attempt would violate 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a federal law prohibiting the deprivation of civil rights. In the immediate aftermath of the execution attempt, the Alabama Attorney General's Office would not comment on whether it would seek a second execution attempt.

On March 26, 2018, a little over a month after the attempted execution, Hamm and the state of Alabama reached a confidential settlement. The settlement “resolved all of the state and federal litigation” that was still pending in the case at the time and ended the efforts by Alabama to set a second execution date for Hamm.

In a press conference announcing that Oklahoma would move forward with executions by inert gas inhalation, Joe Allbaugh, the Director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, described the attempt to execute Hamm as "inhumane."

Following Hamm's attempted execution, the Associated Press and other news outlets requested the state's execution protocol and related records. The state initially denied the request, claiming that the execution protocol was secret. A district court ordered that that state could not keep its protocol secret and had to disclose the requested records. In March 2019, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling. The Eleventh Circuit wrote that “The fact that Alabama zealously guards information about a matter of great public concern does not tip the scales against disclosure. The court concludes that the considerations in favor of unsealing the records greatly outweigh Alabama’s interest in maintaining secrecy.”

The events surrounding Alabama's attempt to execute Hamm were recounted in a Supreme Court brief that was filed in Bucklew v. Precythe, a 2019 Supreme Court case concerning the death penalty. The brief was filed on behalf of former federal and state judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials, who were urging the Supreme Court to prohibit the execution of Russell Bucklew. Bucklew was ultimately executed in October 2019.

Hamm died in prison of cancer-related complications on November 28, 2021, at the age of 64.