Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, 1,468 people have been executed in the United States. Alabama has accounted for 61 of those executions.

According to the Alabama Department of Corrections website, 182 people now sit on the state’s death row, including five women. The average age on Alabama’s death row is 31.

Those on death row today include James Edmond McWilliams, Jr., who will turn 61 this year. He was moved to death row in 1986, back when Alabama still used “Yellow Mama,” the nickname given to the state’s electric chair.

The chair acquired its distinctive color when it was first installed in 1927 at Kilby State Prison in Montgomery. It was painted using the highway line paint from the Alabama Highway Department next to the prison. In the three decades since McWilliams was moved to death row, Alabama has stopped using the chair and has instead opted for the lethal injection method. That change was made more than 15 years ago, or roughly halfway through McWilliams’ time waiting to die.

McWilliams was convicted of the December 1984 rape, robbery and murder of Patricia Vallery Reynolds. She was just 22 and was working as a clerk at a Tuscaloosa convenience store on Hargrove Road East.

McWilliams is hardly a sympathetic figure. When he was brought to Tuscaloosa to stand trial for Reynolds’ murder, he was already serving two life sentences for first-degree robbery and rape that occurred the same month as Reynolds’ rape and murder at a Pizza Hut in Mobile.

There are many who would questions why it has taken the state so long to kill McWilliams, why his many appeals have been heard and small matters of the law seemingly endlessly debated.

Then, we meet Anthony Ray Hinton. He spoke last week to a group at Hotel Capstone in Tuscaloosa. Hinton was arrested in 1985 and charged with murdering two restaurant managers near Birmingham in 1985. He was finally released on April Fools’ Day in 2015. His conviction had been overturned and the state moved to drop the case against him after it admitted the evidence didn’t warrant a conviction.

That’s 30 years he waited for his home state to kill him. And it is solid evidence of why what one person calls a “legal technicality” others would simply call a person’s “rights.”

Since 1973, there have been 159 people sentenced to die who were later proven innocent and set free, many through the use of DNA. Certainly there were others convicted by overzealous prosecutors who decided to secure a conviction and allow the truth to fall where it may.

A bill pending in the Alabama Legislature would pay Hinton $1.5 million. Steve Marshall, the state’s attorney general is fighting that bill and it might stall before ever coming for a vote. It may be that Hinton will receive no compensation after unjustly serving 30 years on death row.

One innocent person sent to death row is one too many. And $1.5 million isn’t enough.