Execution date set in gay murder case

The Alabama supreme court set an execution date Monday for a death row inmate whose previous execution date was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Gary Leon Brown, convicted in Jefferson County, Ala., in the 1986 stabbing death of a 60-year-old gay man who was nearly decapitated during a robbery, has now been scheduled for execution on April 24. He was originally slated to die in the electric chair on April 5, 2002. But the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his execution based on his appeal, which in part contended that the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment. Alabama has since switched its primary method of execution to lethal injection. Two other men were also convicted in the brutal murder of Jack David McGraw of Center Point, who was stabbed 78 times and his throat slashed repeatedly and nearly cut through. James Lynn Bynum of Trussville, who was 21 at the time of the murder, was paroled in 1997 from a life sentence. Archie Bankhead of Birmingham, 36 at the time of the murder, is serving a life sentence without parole.