7 min read
Major Takeaways
- Governor Kay Ivey commuted the death sentence of Toforest Johnson to life without parole on Tuesday, ending his time on Alabama death row after 28 years.
- Johnson was convicted in 1998 for the 1995 killing of Jefferson County Deputy William G. Hardy in Birmingham and has maintained his innocence from the start.
- The case against him rested on a single earwitness who was secretly paid $5,000, a fact hidden from his lawyers and the jury for nearly two decades.
- The Jefferson County district attorney and the original prosecutor in the case both say the conviction cannot stand, and the fight for a new trial continues in court.
- A commutation is not an exoneration. Johnson remains convicted and will serve life in prison unless a court overturns his conviction.
Toforest Johnson will not die in an Alabama execution chamber.
On Tuesday, Governor Kay Ivey commuted his death sentence to life without parole.
The decision spares the life of a 53 year old Birmingham man who has spent 28 years on death row at Holman Correctional Facility.
Johnson has said from the beginning that he did not kill Deputy William G. Hardy.
Now the state will never put him to death for it, even as the legal fight over his guilt goes on.
A Life Spared Is Not A Conviction Erased
A commutation changes a sentence. It does not change a verdict.
Johnson remains convicted of capital murder, and he will serve the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole.
The only road to freedom runs through the courts, where his lawyers are still pushing for a new trial.
Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr has formally asked the courts to grant that new trial.
A petition for a fresh review of the case has also been pending in Jefferson County Circuit Court.
Unless one of those efforts succeeds, Johnson stays behind bars. What changed on Tuesday is that the threat of an execution date is gone.
The Night Deputy Hardy Died
In the early morning hours of July 19, 1995, Deputy William G. Hardy was working off duty security at the Crown Sterling Suites hotel in Birmingham.
Hardy was 49 years old and a 23 year veteran of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
He was shot twice in the hotel parking lot and died from his wounds.
There were no eyewitnesses to the shooting itself.
No physical evidence ever tied Toforest Johnson to that parking lot.
Four young Black men were charged with capital murder as the investigation unfolded.
Charges against two of them were later dropped. A third was acquitted at trial.
Johnson alone was convicted, and Johnson alone was sent to death row.
One Witness And A Five Thousand Dollar Secret
The state built its case on one woman and one phone call.
Violet Ellison told police she had been listening in on three way calls her daughter placed to the Jefferson County Jail.
She said she heard a man call himself Toforest and confess to the shooting.
Ellison had never met Johnson. She did not know his voice.
Her account also clashed with the physical evidence, which showed both shots came from a single gun.
What the jury never heard was that the state paid Ellison $5,000 in reward money.
That payment was kept secret from Johnson, from his lawyers, and from the jurors who decided his fate.
The state finally disclosed it in 2019, after years of denial.
Three of the jurors who voted to convict said afterward that they would never have voted for guilt had they known about the money.
In 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States sent the case back to the Alabama courts over the handling of that hidden payment.
The state courts still refused Johnson a new trial.
Jeff Wallace, the lead prosecutor at trial, testified under oath that he did not think the state case was very strong because it depended on Ellison.
An Alibi Across Town
Johnson’s lawyers have always said he was nowhere near the hotel that night.
As many as ten witnesses placed him at Tee’s Place, a nightclub across town in Birmingham.
They remembered him there with his friend Ardragus Ford, pushing Ford in his wheelchair.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, presented five different theories of who killed Deputy Hardy across the court proceedings in this case.
At the grand jury stage, the lead detective swore there was no doubt that two other men fired the shots.
Ford, tried separately, was acquitted in 1999.
Johnson’s first trial ended with a hung jury. At his retrial in 1998, he was convicted, and the jury voted 10 to 2 to recommend death.
The Prosecutors Who Changed Sides
What makes this case unlike any other on Alabama death row is who is asking for it to be undone.
Danny Carr is the first Black district attorney in the Birmingham division of Jefferson County.
His office spent months reviewing the case file from top to bottom.
Carr concluded that the evidence had unraveled and that the conviction was fundamentally unreliable.
“When reviewed all together, the conviction and death sentence in this case cannot be justified or allowed to stand,” Carr wrote in a court filing.
Jeff Wallace, the very prosecutor who won the conviction in 1998, joined Carr in calling for a new trial.
Former Alabama Chief Justice Drayton Nabers Jr. reached the same conclusion.
So did former Attorney General Bill Baxley, a lifelong defender of the death penalty.
“An innocent man is trapped on Alabama’s death row,” Baxley wrote.
Faith communities across Alabama took up the cause as well, carrying banners from town to town under a simple message: it is not too late to fix this mistake.
What It Means For Black Alabama
For Black families in Birmingham, this case has never been only about one man.
It is about a system that sent a man to die on the word of a paid witness it kept secret.
It is about how long a flawed conviction can stand even after the prosecutor and the district attorney say it should fall.
Johnson has five children. His daughters Shanaye Poole and Akeriya Terry grew up visiting a father on death row and became public voices in his fight.
Urban City Podcast covers this same justice system every week, from cases where families get no accountability at all, like the decision to bring no charges in the shooting death of 1 year old Kohen Wiley, to the Charlotte officers who quit amid a racist text probe.
The commutation is the third death sentence Governor Ivey has commuted, after she spared Rocky Myers in 2025 and Charles Burton earlier this year.
Each time, the pattern has been the same: deep doubt about a conviction that the courts would not revisit on their own.
Tuesday’s decision means Toforest Johnson will grow old in prison instead of dying by execution.
Whether he will ever walk free is now a question for the courts alone.
His family has waited 28 years for an answer. They are still waiting, but for the first time, they are waiting without a death sentence over his name.
Read more of our coverage on communities fighting City Hall and the courts, including the Memphis data center vote and the residents fighting for their neighborhood.
