Herbert Richardson in Just Mercy: Bombing, Vietnam, and Execution

Herbert Richardson, whose case Bryan Stevenson recounts in Just Mercy, was a Black Vietnam War veteran executed by the State of Alabama on August 18, 1989, for a 1977 pipe bombing that killed an eleven-year-old girl. His story occupies Chapter Four of Stevenson’s 2014 memoir and became one of the book’s most-discussed cases because Richardson’s combat trauma, psychiatric illness, and childhood abuse were never presented to the jury that sentenced him to death.

The 1977 Bombing in Dothan

At about 6:00 a.m. on August 16, 1977, a pipe bomb exploded on the front porch of Doris Wyms’ home in Dothan, Alabama. The blast killed Rena Mae Collins, a ten-year-old girl visiting her aunt. Rena Mae and a twelve-year-old friend had found what looked like a drink can inside a plastic bag on the porch, and the device detonated as she pulled her arm back to throw it away.¹

Herbert Lee Richardson, an electrician and former boyfriend of Doris Wyms, was identified as the bomber. Their relationship had ended in May 1977, and Richardson had spent the following months harassing and threatening Wyms and her family. Prosecutors described the device as an “anti-personnel” bomb designed to be triggered by movement and intended for Wyms herself. At trial, Richardson denied making or placing the bomb. Years later, during a 1988 federal hearing, he admitted placing it but said it was meant to be a “stink bomb” rather than a lethal explosive.¹

Vietnam Service and Untreated Trauma

Richardson was born on February 16, 1946, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1964, and served with the 11th Aviation Group, 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, he survived a mission in which the rest of his platoon was killed, suffering traumatic head injuries and being knocked unconscious.² He was discharged in December 1966 “under honorable conditions” after unexplained “crying spells.”³

After Vietnam, Richardson lived with severe head pain, suicidal ideation, crying outbursts, and what EJI described as “uncommunicative withdrawal.”² He said he had been exposed to Agent Orange and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.³ He had also been physically abused as a child, beginning at age seven.

None of this reached the jury.

A Death Sentence Without Mitigation

Richardson was convicted of capital murder in 1978 under an Alabama statute covering an intentional killing caused by exploding a device near an inhabited dwelling.⁴ According to EJI, the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to remove every Black prospective juror, producing an all-white jury.²

Richardson’s trial attorney presented no evidence of his client’s military service, combat trauma, psychiatric illness, or childhood abuse at sentencing. The attorney failed to appeal the conviction and was later disbarred.² With nothing on the mitigation side of the ledger, the sentencing judge relied on two prior North Carolina misdemeanor convictions for assaults on women, drawn from a presentence report, to reject the mitigating factor of “no significant history of prior criminal activity.”¹

Richardson spent eleven years on death row. His appeals moved through the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the Alabama Supreme Court, two rounds of state coram nobis proceedings, and a federal habeas petition. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of habeas relief in January 1989, rejecting his ineffective-assistance claim among others.¹

Bryan Stevenson’s Final Effort

Bryan Stevenson took on Richardson’s case through a fledgling nonprofit law center he and Eva Ansley had opened in Tuscaloosa in February 1989 to provide free legal services to death row inmates. Stevenson’s defense centered on the mental health and combat trauma that had never been heard. He argued that Alabama’s capital statute required an “intentional” murder, a threshold he believed Richardson’s psychiatric condition undercut.⁵

In August 1989, Stevenson filed a stay request citing ineffective assistance of counsel, the trial lawyer’s failure to present evidence of military service and psychiatric illness, racial bias in jury selection, and inflammatory prosecutorial conduct.² Lucia Penland of the Alabama Prison Project warned at the time that Richardson’s would be “the first time in our state that a Vietnam veteran suffering from the effects of his service in the Vietnam War is executed.”³

Governor Guy Hunt denied clemency. The U.S. Supreme Court refused a stay, issuing its denial at 7:00 p.m. on August 18, 1989.²

The Execution

Richardson was executed at Holman Prison that night. Stevenson visited him in the final hours. Richardson remarked on the irony that he had received more offers of help in the last fourteen hours of his life than during the years he struggled with trauma. As guards walked him to the execution chamber, a cassette player at his request played “The Old Rugged Cross.”²

It was the first execution Stevenson ever witnessed. He later wrote that he “wasn’t prepared to see Herbert die,” and the experience shaped his commitment to representing condemned prisoners.⁶

The Chapter in Just Mercy

Richardson’s story fills Chapter Four of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, titled “The Old Rugged Cross.”⁵ The book’s main narrative follows the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillian, but Richardson’s case serves a different function: he was guilty of causing a death, and the chapter asks what justice looks like when a guilty defendant is also a man the state trained for combat, sent home broken, and then killed.

Stevenson uses the chapter to draw a line between Alabama’s willingness to execute Richardson and its failure to help him as a veteran carrying psychiatric trauma. He reflects on giving hope to condemned clients when the legal outlook is bleak, and he describes Richardson telling him that the prospect of being killed by the state disturbed him more than anything he had seen in Vietnam.⁷ Quieter moments fill out the chapter as well: Richardson’s correspondence with and marriage to a woman while on death row, his attempts to hold himself together for his family, and Stevenson singing “The Old Rugged Cross” to calm Richardson’s wife during the final hours.⁶

Richardson in the 2019 Film

In the 2019 film adaptation directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Richardson is played by Rob Morgan. The film portrays him as a guilt-ridden Vietnam veteran who believes he deserves his punishment but whose mental illness was never addressed before the crime or adequately raised at trial. One reviewer called Richardson’s arc “the one truly successful element” of the film, praising Morgan’s performance as the only portrayal that felt “fleshed out, complex and real.”⁸

Editor Nat Sanders described the execution sequence as the movie’s “emotional apex,” showing Richardson strapped into the electric chair, intercut with fellow death row inmates rattling their cups against their bars, over “Old Rugged Cross.”⁹ Morgan said in an interview that he viewed the role as a “beautiful responsibility” to “give voice to this character, so it could be right in our faces and we can ask ourselves if anyone is worth that kind of punishment.”¹⁰

Why the Case Still Matters

Richardson’s case sits at the intersection of several continuing debates about the death penalty. EJI counts him among sixty-six people executed in Alabama whose outcomes were, in the organization’s assessment, directly shaped by ineffective legal assistance.²

The law around veterans and mitigation has moved, though not in time to reach Richardson. PTSD was not formally recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980, two years after his trial.¹¹ In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Porter v. McCollum that a capital defense attorney’s failure to investigate and present evidence of a veteran’s combat service and resulting trauma constituted ineffective assistance of counsel, writing that “[o]ur nation has a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service.”¹² The ruling did not cite Richardson, but the failure it addressed was the failure Stevenson had identified in Richardson’s defense twenty years earlier.

The Supreme Court has not created a broad death penalty exemption for the severely mentally ill, and veterans continue to appear on death rows across the country. EJI links Richardson’s story to its broader research on the mistreatment of Black veterans and continues to use his case in advocacy for capital punishment reform.¹³

1
Resource.org. Richardson v. Johnson, 864 F.2d 1536
2
Equal Justice Initiative. Herbert Richardson
3
UPI. Vietnam Veteran Executed for Pipe Bomb Slaying
4
Justia. Ex Parte Richardson, 376 So. 2d 228
5
Equal Justice Initiative. Just Mercy Discussion Guide
6
LitCharts. Herbert Richardson Character Analysis
7
SparkNotes. Just Mercy Section 3 Summary
8
RogerEbert.com. Just Mercy Movie Review
9
Motion Picture Association. In Fact-Based Just Mercy, Editor Nat Sanders Cuts to the Truth
10
CBS News. Rob Morgan Just Mercy Interview
11
Death Penalty Information Center. Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty
12
Justia. Porter v. McCollum, 558 U.S. 30
13
Equal Justice Initiative. Report Documents High Rate of Death Sentences Imposed on Military Veterans