On Tuesday morning, Kenneth Smith will be transferred from the Holman correctional facility in Alabama to “death row,” the explicitly named holding unit where condemned inmates are placed two days before their appointed execution.
Smith knows the cell well. He knows the dimensions and the feel of the space. Barring a last-minute postponement, he knows he is only 20 feet from the death chamber, where he will be escorted in handcuffs and leg irons before being strapped to a stretcher on Thursday to await his fate.
Relating to: Alarms that Alabama man would be gassed were rejected by veterinarians
He knows because he’s been on death row before. He placed him there in November 2022 as Alabama’s department of corrections prepared to execute him by lethal injection.
He said goodbye to his mother and grandchild from inside the cell. He had eaten his last meal. He was then taken to the death chamber, where he remained on a stretcher for four hours as prison officials unsuccessfully tried to find a vein.
He hung upside down for several minutes as authorities worked frantically to secure his IV line. By the time the authorities conceded defeat and canceled the execution, he was left with holes in his body.
In the process, Smith was granted entry into a highly elite but unwelcome club of only two members: Americans who could describe what it was like to survive an execution.
Now, just 14 months later, he finds himself back on death row, about to live it all over again. Except this time the protocol is different.
Smith, 58, is in danger of being executed using an untested method that has never before been used in capital punishment in the United States. This is a technique rejected by veterinarians on ethical grounds for the euthanasia of most animals other than pigs: death by nitrogen gas.
This week Smith contacted the Warden from Holman prison and spent his allotted 15 minutes making outside calls explaining the surreal situation he now finds himself in. He is an execution survivor who is about to undergo execution procedures for the second time using a method that has never been tried.
Under these circumstances, is he prepared to return to death row any time soon?
“I’m not ready for this. Not at all. “I’m not ready yet, brother,” he said.
Following Smith’s botched execution, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was prescribed a number of medications, including drugs to control migraines. The prison psychiatrist noted that he suffered from insomnia, anxiety and depression; these were symptoms often associated with severe trauma.
He told the Guardian he couldn’t sleep because of frequent nightmares and “whatever games you play in the middle of the night”. After the first execution attempt, he said he had a recurring nightmare about being taken back to the death chamber.
“All I had to do for the dream to be overwhelming was to enter the room in my dream. “I was absolutely terrified,” he said. “It keeps popping up.”
Since he was given a second execution date of January 25, he began to have a new nightmare.
“I imagine they’re coming to get me,” he said.
He can feel his physical and mental condition deteriorating as his second touch on the execution chamber approaches. She said she had a “stomach sickness” and found herself gagging most days. The nurse in the infirmary stressed this.
Smith has an unusual way of conveying trauma after trauma he has been exposed to.
“They didn’t give me a chance to heal,” he said. “I’m still suffering from the first execution and now we’re doing it again. They won’t even let me have post-traumatic stress disorder; “You know, it’s an ongoing stress disorder.”
Smith asked the Guardian to imagine what would happen if an abuse victim were forced by the abuser to return directly to the hostile environment that traumatized them.
“The person who did this would probably be seen as a monster,” he said. “But when the government does that, you know, that’s another thing.”
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A pastor’s wife on March 18, 1988 Elizabeth Sennett was stabbed to death in her home in Colbert County, Alabama. A week later, her husband, Charles Sennett, a pastor at the Church of Christ, killed himself after detectives began focusing on the fact that she had been having an affair, was heavily in debt and had taken out a life insurance policy on him. spouse.
Smith was one of two men hired through an intermediary for the murder and paid $1,000 each. At the trial, Smith admitted agreeing to treat Elizabeth Sennett harshly but denied intending to kill her.
The jury voted 11 to 1 to impose a life sentence, but that decision was overruled by the judge who sent him to death row.
How does he look back on his crime now, just days away from a second execution attempt?
“I wish I had done some things differently,” he said. “One second, one moment in a person’s life. And this was the only thing that happened; I have never had an incident with officers, not a single fight with inmates in 35 years. “Violence is not my personality.”
Yet many people in Alabama and across the United States believe he deserves all the punishment he receives for what he did. What does he say to them?
“I have been in prison for 35 years, how could I not be punished? “Thirty-five years,” he said. “I have not gone unpunished for 35 years. I suffered while doing this. So did my family.”
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The new method Alabama planned to kill Smith Thursday is known as nitrogen hypoxia. It involves forcing the prisoner to breathe pure nitrogen, a gas found naturally in the air in concentrations high enough to cause oxygen deprivation and eventual death.
The idea was first adopted by Oklahoma, another active death penalty state, in 2015. The Marshall Project revealed that this scheme was concocted by a criminal justice professor with no medical or scientific training, whose claim to expertise was that of a former prosecutor. Western Pacific Ocean islands of Palau – one of the smallest countries in the world, with a population of 18,000.
Having gone through a four-hour attempted judicial murder by lethal injection, Smith now investigates the unknown. When asked what he feared most, possibly the introduction of nitrogen gas in the first application of its kind, Smith initially made a general argument.
“I am afraid that it will be successful and that the nitrogen system will come to your state very soon. That’s what I’m worried about.”
There really is no compassion in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine
Smith has a point. Although never carried out, execution by nitrogen is on record in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma, and other states, including Louisiana, are considering it.
But this is an extremely rare fear for someone this close to returning to the death chamber. Don’t they have personal fears?
“I try not to think about it. I try not to read too much into it,” he said.
Then he added: “I’m vomiting into that mask. Because if I do, brother, no one can help me. “I’m going to choke on my own vomit and my wife will have to sit there and watch.”
There has been a lot of discussion about the mask that Alabama plans to give itself nitrogen. A federal judge described the mechanism in a court document as “an industrial-grade, continuous-flow, air-supplied respirator with an adjustable five-point harness system and a flexible, double-flange rubber gasket that will fit and retain the mask securely across the entire surface.” user’s face – including eyes, nose, mouth and chin”.
Critics warned that the danger was that if the seal was not perfect, oxygen could leak into the mask, leading to a prolonged and distressing death. It is one thing to offer an industrial mask to a worker to protect himself, but it is quite another to impose it on a person who is struggling and resisting to survive.
“I disagree,” Smith said, referring to his own execution. “I’m not going to take the mask and put it on, you know, I’m not going to help them.”
The idea of cooperating with the Department of Corrections in his own death reminded Smith of what guards told him during the botched execution in 2022 when they tried to stick a giant needle under his collarbone, he told the Guardian. Smith recalled crying in excruciating pain.
Holding his head tightly as he did so, the assistant principal leaned towards him and told him to relax. “Kenny, this is for your own good,” he said.
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One of Smith’s biggest concerns as he prepares himself for the second time he will have to say goodbye to those he loves most. If the execution goes ahead, his wife, Deeanna, will be with him in the witness section of the death chamber, but he will have to have final words beforehand with his 78-year-old mother, Linda – “my little mom” – and his 12-year-old grandson, Crimson, is named after the University of Alabama football team.
“This is very, very difficult. “I’m putting them through this again and I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” he said. “There’s a tough group with me, you know my family is amazing. “We will get through this.”
His lawyers are filing eleventh-hour appeals to federal judges, arguing that both the proposed use of nitrogen and the fact that Smith was already traumatized by the failed attempt to kill him are cruel and unusual forms of punishment prohibited under the U.S. constitution. They are pushing for a stay of execution, but at this final stage the sand in the hourglass is running out.
When the buzzer sounds, indicating the end of 15 minutes, I ask one last question. If he had a chance to say anything to people at large, what would it be?
“You know, brother, I would say, ‘Leave room for mercy.’ This is not available in Alabama. “There really is no compassion in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine.”