Michael Taylor is scheduled for execution in Alabama on November 5, 2026, for the 1991 capital murders of Ivan and Lucille Moore. Please sign the petition below to tell the governor that the death penalty is wrong.
Reasons why this execution is especially in need of attention:
1. Alabama obtained its warrant to execute Michael Taylor on the premise that he would die by nitrogen hypoxia. Days after a federal court, following a full trial, ruled that Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia protocol violates the Eighth Amendment, the State abruptly announced it would instead execute Michael by lethal injection — a method he never elected and never agreed to. The Alabama Supreme Court has since declined, without opinion or explanation, to resolve whether that switch is even lawful. As of today, no court has said which method may lawfully be used on Michael Taylor, or whether the State’s about-face is permitted at all. The State wants to move forward with an execution while unable to answer the most basic question of how it intends to carry it out.
2. Michael Taylor committed the crimes that put him on death row when he was just 19. Two decades of neuroscience have made one thing unmistakably clear: the prefrontal cortex — the region governing reasoning, impulse control, and the ability to weigh consequences — does not fully mature until the mid-20s. Teenagers and young adults are biologically less capable of the moral calculus the death penalty assumes they made.
3. Michael Taylor is 54 years old. Thirty-five years have passed. The man the State of Alabama seeks to execute is not the chaotic, unformed young man who committed those atrocious acts. Michael has grown into someone fundamentally different — and the evidence of that transformation is not abstract. Over decades of incarceration, he has developed a deep and abiding faith. Michael’s faith took root and grew through the people who showed up anyway: volunteer ministers and laypeople from Alabama churches who gave their time to sit with him, and fellow men on the row who walked alongside him. His relationship with Jesus Christ — cultivated through that community — has reshaped how he understands himself, how he treats others, and how he carries the weight of what that 19-year-old did. Michael is profoundly and genuinely remorseful. He does not minimize what happened. He grieves it.
4. Alabama ought to delay all executions to allow for a thorough study of its capital punishment process and consider the serious objections raised as to how it administers the death penalty.
Learn more at www.phadp.org