Thursday Alabama executed a 74-year-old man for a murder he committed in 1977. From a Washington Post report via SFGate,com —
J.B. Hubbard’s failing body kept him lying in bed — a bunk on Alabama’s death row — most of the last days of his life. Other inmates say they walked his wobbly frame to the showers and listened to him complain about the pain: the cancer in his colon and prostate, the hypertension, the aching back. They combed his hair because he couldn’t. They washed him.
When spasms of dementia made him forget who he was — what he was — they told him: a 74-year-old, small-town Alabama man gone bad, a twice- convicted murderer, the oldest inmate on “the row.”