Alabama Again Cancels an Execution Over Delays Inserting IV Lines
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After last-minute appeals and issues with inserting an IV line, prison officials determined there was not enough time left to execute an inmate before his death warrant expired.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Published Nov. 17, 2022
Updated Nov. 18, 2022, 2:27 a.m. ET
Alabama called off its plans to execute a man on Thursday after a whirlwind few hours in which the Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed, but prison officials determined they did not have enough time to kill the man before his death warrant expired at midnight.
It was the second time in less than two months that Alabama had brought a prisoner into its execution chamber, strapped him to a gurney and begun trying to insert intravenous lines — only to call off the execution and return him to his cell. In both cases, it appeared that prison officials had struggled to insert the lines into the prisoners after last-minute appeals were thrown out by the Supreme Court.
On Thursday, officials began trying to insert intravenous lines into the man, Kenneth Eugene Smith, shortly after 10 p.m., but were able to insert only one of the two lines through which the lethal injection drugs could flow. John Q. Hamm, the commissioner of Alabama’s prisons, said prison officials determined that they could not insert a second, necessary line before the death warrant expired, and at 11:21 p.m. temporarily called the execution off. He said the people attempting to carry out the execution had tried to insert a line into “several locations” without success.
The episode was strikingly similar to the other case, in September, in which officials sought to execute Alana Eugene Miller but were unable to insert a line into his veins before his death warrant expired. Following that attempt, Mr. Miller’s lawyers had described him as the “only living execution survivor” in the United States, a group that Mr. Smith has now joined.
Earlier, in July, Alabama had executed a third man, Joe Nathan James, after struggling for hours to access his veins and apparently slicing into one of his arms in what is known as a “cutdown.” The account of that execution has served as the basis of several appeals by death row prisoners in the state.
Earlier on Thursday, Mr. Smith’s lawyers had successfully convinced an appeals court to halt the execution so that they could argue that Alabama's problems inserting intravenous lines could lead Mr. Smith to suffer an illegally “cruel” death. But the Supreme Court overturned that decision, clearing the way for the execution in an order with no explanation. The order noted that the high court’s three liberal members — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — had voted to uphold the temporary stay.
Even before then, the planned execution of Mr. Smith, 57, had been unusual.
A jury had convicted Mr. Smith for the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett, finding that Ms. Sennett’s husband, a pastor, had paid Mr. Smith to kill her. In the sentencing phase, the jurors voted 11 to 1 to spare Mr. Smith’s life and sentence him to life in prison with no opportunity for parole. But a judge ordered Mr. Smith to be executed, overruling the jury in a practice that Alabama banned in 2017 and which is no longer allowed anywhere in the United States.
Lawyers for Mr. Smith had been unsuccessful in challenging his execution based on the judge’s decision, but they filed a flurry of appeals on other matters — including Alabama’s recent problems administering lethal injections — that delayed the execution by several hours.
Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama said in a statement that while Alabama had made a “necessary” change to ban judges from overruling jurors’ recommendations, lawmakers had chosen not to make the law retroactive in order to honor sentences that had already been handed down and the victims’ relatives who were relying on them for justice.
“Although that justice could not be carried out tonight because of last-minute legal attempts to delay or cancel the execution, attempting it was the right thing to do,” said Ms. Ivey, a Republican. “My prayers are with the victim’s children and grandchildren as they are forced to relive their tragic loss.”
In a brief email early on Friday, one of Mr. Smith’s lawyers said that he and other lawyers were working into the morning to draft legal filings and work out their next steps.
“Tonight is really tough,” said the lawyer, Jeffrey Horowitz.
Mr. Smith was convicted in 1996 of murdering Ms. Sennett, the pastor’s wife. The pastor, who had offered $1,000 each to Mr. Smith and another man to kill her, killed himself a week after the murder. The other hired hit man was executed in 2010.
At his sentencing proceeding, Mr. Smith’s lawyers noted that he was 22 years old at the time of the crime and had been “neglected and deprived” in his childhood. Other mitigating factors included that Mr. Smith was remorseful, had no significant criminal history and had conducted himself well in jail. Eleven jurors voted for a life sentence with no parole.
But the judge in the case, N. Pride Tompkins, said that the aggravating factors in the case outweighed those issues: Mr. Smith had been paid for the crime, and he had ample opportunity to back out of the murder-for-hire plan but went along with it anyway. Jurors, he said, had heard an “emotional appeal” from Mr. Smith’s mother. Overruling the jury, he imposed the death sentence.
Alabama is one of four states — in addition to Delaware, Florida and Indiana — that ever allowed judges to overrule jurors who recommended against a death sentence, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. All of those states have since outlawed the practice or had it declared illegal by courts.
Mr. Smith’s scheduled execution was to be the fourth this week across the country. Two men were executed on Wednesday, in Arizona and in Texas, and a third was executed in Oklahoma on Thursday morning.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national news. He is from upstate New York and previously reported in Baltimore, Albany, and Isla Vista, Calif. @nickatnews
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