Alabama’s Oldest Prisoner Dies in Hospital

Loaded on July 15, 2025 published in Prison Legal News July, 2025, page 59

Filed under: Geriatric Classification, Totality of Conditions, Age, Compassionate Release. Location: Alabama.

Floyd Lee Coleman, 106, passed away on May 19, 2025, at a hospital near the William Donaldson Correctional Facility, where he was a prisoner in Bessemer, Alabama. Coleman, who had spent more than forty-five years locked up, was the state’s oldest prisoner—and likely among the oldest in the country.

In 1978, Coleman was arrested for the rape and murder of Quintina Steele, a 7-year-old girl. Although Coleman was originally sentenced to death by electric chair, that sentence was overturned after the Supreme Court of the U.S. decided Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625 (1980), which held that the death sentence cannot be imposed if the jury was not permitted to consider a lesser offence for a verdict. Coleman pleaded guilty before he could be retried, and he received a life sentence without parole in 1984.

The U.S. prison population has been “graying” for at least the last three decades, with the percentage of prisoners who are 55 or older growing from 3% to 15% during that time. One in six prisoners—nearly 200,000 people—is serving a life sentence, and 56,245 prisoners are serving life without parole. While prisons are unhealthy at any age, incarceration is particularly dangerous for older adults; in addition, prisoners who are 65 and older are the least likely group to be re-arrested after being released.

Sources: WVTM, Prison Policy Initiative, The Sentencing Project

Alabama’s Oldest Prisoner Dies in Hospital

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