Qualla: Yellow Mama

Yellow Mama: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The color was an accident. When Alabama needed an electric chair in 1927, the state turned to an unlikely craftsman: Ed Mason, a British inmate at Kilby State Prison near Montgomery, serving 60 years for theft and grand larceny. Mason was a master carpenter by trade, and he built the chair with the precision of a man who understood wood. When it came time to paint it, someone grabbed what was available -- highway-line paint from the adjacent State Highway Department lab. The chair came out bright yellow, and the inmates gave it a name that stuck: Yellow Mama. Mason was rewarded with a 30-day pass for his work. He used it to disappear, turning up later in a New York state penitentiary. The chair he left behind would be used to execute people in Alabama for the next 75 years.

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Yellow Mama: Before the Chair

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 1923, the business of execution in Alabama belonged to the counties. Each one maintained its own gallows and carried out hangings in private. It was a decentralized system that produced inconsistent results and, occasionally, public spectacles that state officials found emb...

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Yellow Mama: The Botched Executions

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yellow Mama's history is marked by failures that became national news. In 1983, John Louis Evans -- the first person executed in Alabama after the Supreme Court's Furman v. Georgia ruling temporarily halted capital punishment -- received an initial jolt of electricity that lasted...

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Yellow Mama: A Catalog of the Condemned

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The names on Yellow Mama's ledger trace a cross-section of Alabama's darkest chapters. Rhonda Belle Martin, a serial killer who poisoned members of her own family, was executed in 1957. Jeremiah Reeves, just 22 years old, was put to death in 1958 for a rape conviction that drew c...

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Yellow Mama: Retirement to the Attic

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last person executed in Yellow Mama was Lynda Lyon Block, put to death on May 10, 2002, for murder. Less than two months later, on July 1, Alabama revised its death penalty law to allow inmates a choice between lethal injection and electrocution. The yellow chair was carried ...

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