Execution delay sought for Alabama killer

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — An attorney for Alabama death row inmate Danny Joe Bradley, who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of his 12-year-old stepdaughter, has asked a federal appeals court to block his scheduled execution next week.

But prosecutors said the 48-year-old Bradley, of Piedmont in northeast Alabama, has exhausted his appeals and his execution by lethal injection, set for Feb. 12 at Holman prison near Atmore, should not be delayed.

It is the second of five executions scheduled in the first five months of this year, an unusual grouping for Alabama, which had no executions last year.

Bradley attorney Theodore A. Howard of Washington, D.C., said Tuesday by e-mail that the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was asked to stay the execution because the appeals court has not settled a DNA issue pending before it in Bradley’s case.

DNA testing was not available when Bradley was tried, and the Alabama Supreme Court in 2001 granted him a stay of execution pending DNA testing of evidence.

It turned out that some critical evidence sought — rape kit swabs, slides from the autopsy and semen-stained clothing of the 12-year-old girl — had been lost, but bedding items were found. A federal judge in Birmingham in 2007 denied Bradley’s suit over the missing evidence. Bradley appealed to the 11th Circuit, which has not yet ruled.

Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw, Alabama’s capital litigation chief, has urged the 11th Circuit not to delay the execution. In a recent filing with the appeals court, he said that bedding items, which were kept as evidence, were DNA-tested, establishing Bradley’s guilt without a doubt.

It was unclear Tuesday when the appeals court might rule on the stay request.

The stay Bradley received in 2001 came one week before he was to die.

His conviction was in the Jan. 24, 1983, killing of his stepdaughter, Rhonda Hardin. Bradley was caring for the girl and her younger brother, Gary “Bubba” Hardin, when she was raped, sodomized and strangled after her brother went to sleep. The children’s mother was in the hospital.

Rhonda’s body was found the next morning in some woods less than a mile from Bradley’s apartment. Her brother later testified in the Calhoun County trial that Bradley had frequently rendered the children unconscious by squeezing their necks.

In Alabama’s most recent execution, 62-year-old James Harvey Callahan, also of Calhoun County, was given a lethal injection last month for the 1982 kidnapping, rape and killing of a Jacksonville woman.