On January 5, 1977, he and Ritter robbed and killed Edward Nassar, a pawn shop owner in Mobile, Alabama, while his two young daughters were in the store.
Although he gave a detailed confession, prosecutors refused to accept his plea of guilty because they wanted Evans sentenced to death, and under Alabama law, this is only allowed following a conviction by a jury.
Evans was tried in State Circuit Court in Mobile, Alabama on April 26, 1977, for first-degree murder committed during the commission of a robbery.
Despite his testimony, the jury was instructed to consider all the evidence and return a guilty verdict only if the prosecutors had left no reasonable doubt.
After less than fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted Evans of the capital offense charged, thus imposing the death penalty.
The application requested the Court find Evans's conviction unconstitutional because consideration of lesser included offenses was not offered to the jury.
This finding was made with two of the justices (William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall) entering an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, because they accepted the argument of the State of Alabama on the matter in question, but held that capital punishment itself was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
The execution was witnessed by reporter Mark Harris, who wrote this first-person account for United Press International published on May 4, 1983.
The prison doctor, dressed in a blue surgical costume and tan loafers with tassels, placed a stethoscope to the smock, turned and nodded – the natural signal for "Yes, he's dead."
At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace, to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.
Shortly before his execution, Evans was featured in an After School Special called "Dead Wrong" in which he shared his life story with young people and pleaded for them not to make the mistakes he did that led to the electric chair.