Officials in the US prison system have received a court order to carry out the death sentence of a 57-year-old man in the state of Alabama. They then went to the prisoner’s cell, took him to an execution chamber, tied him up, and at 10 pm on Thursday (17th), injected him with the first dose of a lethal substance.
The procedure, however, stopped there: the professionals found that, for chemical and biological reasons, the second dose of the substance could not be applied until midnight of the following day, the deadline determined by the Justice for the sentence to be served.
In the end, they canceled the execution and, hours later, returned Kenneth Eugene Smith to his cell.
John Q. Hamm, supervisor of prisons in Alabama, explained the unusual scene by saying that colleagues tried to carry out the execution by injecting the substance in “various places”, but were unsuccessful.
The lack of time for compliance with the sentence is justified, according to The New York Times, by the series of appeals filed by Smith’s defense. Also on Thursday, his lawyers managed to convince an appeals court to stop the execution on grounds that Alabama’s problems with the insertion of intravenous lines could cause Smith to suffer an “illegally cruel” death.
The suspension request prevailed in the appeals court, but the decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, which revived the order around 10:20 pm (01:20 am, in Brazil), according to The Guardian newspaper. Hence the delay in starting the application —also extended by the delay in installing the catheters—, which would not end before the end of the mandate.
In the last two months, the state penitentiary administration aborted two other executions, also after tying the defendant to the stretcher. In both cases, the reason was the delay in the application of the substance, which could exceed the period of the state order.
A similar episode happened in September, when correctional officers tried to execute Alana Eugene Miller but were unable to install the catheter before the end of the term of the execution warrant.
This Thursday’s imbroglio, however, is just one of the legal twists in Smith’s trajectory. The case was even more troubled in the expedition of the sentence. In 1988, his life was spared by a jury, which opted to sentence him to life in prison for manslaughter —a murder at the behest of a pastor who contracted his wife’s death. In the verdict, 11 of the 12 jurors chose to sentence him to life imprisonment.
It turns out that, in Alabama, a 2017 law that prevents judges from overturning jury decisions — a practice already prohibited in the United States — does not have retroactive effect, which paved the way for the magistrate to overturn Smith’s conviction and order the sentence of death.
Defendant’s defense was unable to overturn the decision, but it delayed the execution by several hours by flooding the appellate court with appeals on other issues, citing recent problems in Alabama with administering lethal injections.
Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, said in a statement that while the state has amended legislation to prohibit judges from overturning jury sentences, lawmakers have opted to suppress possible retroactive effect of the rule in order to preserve sentences already handed down.
Ivy insisted that although Thursday’s deadly procedure was called off by appeals at the last moment, “trying it was the right thing to do.”
Smith’s execution would be the fourth in the country this week alone. Two men went to death row in Arizona and a third in Oklahoma.
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