Joe Nathan James Jr. Execution: The Alabama Case That Shocked America

On July 28th, 2022, Alabama executed a man by lethal injection for a murder committed 28 years earlier. The execution was delayed for more than 3 hours. No official explanation was ever given. In today’s video, we’ll take an in-depth look at the execution of Joe Nathan James Jr., a case that became national news not because of what he did, but because of who tried to stop it. The family of the woman he killed.

Stay until the end because you’ll learn about the crime that put him on death row, the years of warnings that came before it, and what happened inside that execution chamber that even the state couldn’t fully explain. Her name was Faith Hall. She was 26 years old, a mother of two young daughters. For about a year and a half, Faith had been in a relationship with a man named Joe Nathan James Jr.

 According to Faith’s brother, the relationship ended, but James didn’t let it go. Prosecutors say James became obsessed with Faith after she rejected him. What followed wasn’t heartbreak. It was a documented campaign of stalking and harassment that lasted for months. Court records tell the story in specifics. In the year before Faith’s death, she and her grandmother filed four police reports against James.

 Three for harassment, one for burglary. The reports describe a pattern that escalated over time. Threats to kill her, forced entry into the home, property damage, banging on windows, constant phone calls, and James sitting parked in the driveway for hours watching the house. This wasn’t a single bad night.

 This was a warning system that ran for nearly a year, and it didn’t stop him. On August 15th, 1994, Faith Hall went shopping with a friend. Afterward, the two women returned to the friend’s apartment. James was waiting. He forced his way inside. Faith and her friend tried to hold the front door shut, but James got in armed with a .

38 caliber pistol. Inside, he accused Faith of being disloyal and deceitful. Then he shot her three times in the chest, the abdomen, and the head. Faith Hall died from her wounds. She was 26 years old. Her daughters were three and six years old at the time. James was arrested and charged with capital murder.

 In 1996, a Jefferson County jury convicted him and recommended the death penalty. A judge imposed the sentence, but the conviction didn’t stand. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturned it, ruling that the trial judge had wrongly allowed certain police reports into evidence. James was retried in 1999. This time, his defense argued he had acted under emotional duress.

 The jury rejected that argument and sentenced him to death a second time. He would spend the next 23 years on Alabama’s death row. In the years that followed, James pursued the appeals process available to him. In the weeks before his execution, he filed several lawsuits in federal court, including a claim that he hadn’t been properly given the option to choose nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method Alabama had approved but not yet built protocols for.

 A federal judge denied his request for a stay on July 14th. The US Supreme Court denied a final request on the day of the execution itself. Here is where this case becomes unlike almost any other on death row. Faith Hall’s daughters, the same two girls who were three and six when their mother was killed, grew up and decades later asked the state of Alabama not to execute the man who murdered her.

 One of them told a local news station that she had carried hatred for James for years. But by 2022, her position had changed. She said their family did not want the state to take a life simply because a life had been taken. A statement released on the family’s behalf before the execution said they had forgiven James for what he did to them.

 And that they hoped one day the justice system would listen when families like theirs asked for something other than death. Alabama’s attorney general disagreed. He said justice had been served and called the killing the cold-blooded murder of an innocent young mother. Governor Kay Ivey chose not to intervene. The execution proceeded.

 The execution was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. It didn’t happen on time. Hours passed. The Alabama Department of Corrections offered no public explanation for the delay. Media witnesses held outside had no idea what was happening inside the facility. It wasn’t until just after 9:00 p.m.

, more than 3 hours late, that the curtains to the execution chamber finally opened. James was already on the gurney, an intravenous line connected to his left arm. His eyes were closed. He did not move. At 9:03 p.m., his death warrant was read aloud. The warden asked if he had any final words. James said nothing. His eyes stayed closed.

 He did not open them. He did not speak. According to witnesses, the only sign of life was his breathing. At 9:04 p.m., the lethal injection began. One minute later, his eyelids fluttered but did not open. He was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. James did not request a final meal. He was observed eating a regular lunch tray earlier that day, but he refused his dinner.

 After the execution, an anti-death penalty advocacy group raised questions about what had actually happened during that 3-hour delay. A private autopsy, reviewed by an anesthesiology professor and lethal injection expert who witnessed it, reportedly showed multiple puncture marks on both of James’s arms, along with two small incisions, each roughly an inch to an inch and a half long.

 The expert said it appeared there had been several attempts to establish an intravenous line before the execution began. Alabama does not allow media witnesses to observe execution preparations. Reporters only see the inmate once he is already strapped to the gurney with the intravenous line already in place.

 That means no outside witness saw what happened in the hours before the curtain opened. Attorneys who had spoken to James by phone earlier that day said they were troubled by his apparent lack of movement and unresponsiveness once the curtain rose. Prison officials were later asked directly whether James had been fully conscious in the moments before his execution began.

 They said they could not confirm that he was. No further explanation for the 3-hour delay was ever made public. Joe Nathan James Jr. spent 23 years on death row for a murder he was convicted of twice. He was executed despite the public forgiveness of the very family he destroyed and he died without explaining, in his own words, anything at all.

 The state said justice had been served. The victim’s family said they wanted mercy instead. If the family of a victim asks the state not to carry out an execution, should that request carry any legal weight? Or does justice mean something separate from what the victim’s own family wants?