by On Tuesday morning, Kenneth Smith will be moved inside the Holman correctional facility in Alabama to the “death cell,” the tersely named holding unit where condemned inmates are placed two days before their scheduled execution.
Smith knows the cell well. He knows the dimensions and the feel of the place. He knows he is only about 20 feet from the death chamber, and, except for a last-minute hold, he will be escorted in handcuffs and leg irons on Thursday before he is bound over to a jury to await his destiny.
Related: Alarm as Alabama man to be executed by gas method rejected by vets
He knows because he has been inside death row before. In November 2022, the Alabama Department of Corrections placed him there as they prepared to execute him by lethal injection.
From inside that cell, he said goodbye to his mother and grandson. He had his last meal. He was then taken to the death chamber, where he spent four hours on the phone as prison officials tried unsuccessfully to find a violin.
He was suspended upside down for several minutes as officers worked frantically to get an IV line. By the time the officers admitted defeat and called execution, his body was riddled with puncture holes.
In the process, Smith was introduced to a very elite but very undesirable club with a membership of only two – Americans who can describe how he is to survive execution.
Now, just 14 months later, he is about to be put back on death row, about to go through it all over again. Only this time the protocol is different.
Smith, 58, is facing execution by an untested method never before used in the death penalty in the United States. It is a technique vets have rejected on ethical grounds for the euthanasia of most animals other than pigs: nitrogen gas death.
This week, Smith contacted the Guardian from Holman prison and spent his allotted 15 minutes on outside phone calls describing the surreal situation in which he now finds himself. He is an execution survivor who is about to go through execution procedures a second time, through a completely untried method.
Is he prepared himself if he soon returns to death row under these circumstances?
“I’m not ready for that. No way. I’m not ready, brother,” he said.
As a result of Smith’s failed execution, he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is being prescribed a cocktail of medications including drugs to control migraines. His prison psychiatrist has recorded that he suffers from insomnia, anxiety and depression – symptoms often associated with severe trauma.
He told the Guardian that he could not sleep because of frequent nightmares and the “what games do you play in the middle of the night”. After the first execution attempt, he said, he had repeated nightmares of being escorted back to the death chamber.
“All I had to do was walk into the room in the dream for it to be overwhelming. I was very scared,” he said. “It just kept coming up.”
Since he was given a second execution date of January 25, he has a fresh round of nightmares.
“I dream that they are coming to get me,” he said.
As the second brush with the execution chamber draws near, he can feel his physical and mental state deteriorating. He said he’s “sick to his stomach”, and he’s been throwing up most days. The nurse in the infirmary stressed him out.
Smith has an unusual way of expressing the trauma-on-trauma he is being subjected to.
“They didn’t give me a chance to heal,” he said. “I am still suffering from the first execution and now we are doing this again. They won’t even let me have post-traumatic stress disorder – you know, this is persistent stress disorder.”
Smith asked the Guardian to imagine what would happen if a victim of abuse were forced to return to the hostile environment that traumatized them in the first place.
“Someone who would do that would probably be considered a monster,” he said. “But when the government does it, you know, that’s another thing.”
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On 18 March 1988, a priest’s wife in Colbert county, Alabama, Elizabeth Sennett, who was stabbed to death in her home. A week later her husband, Charles Sennett, a minister at Christ Church, killed himself after the detectives began to focus on the fact that he was having an affair, was deeply in debt, and had an insurance policy He has built a life. wife.
Smith was one of two hired through an intermediary for the murder, and each paid $1,000. At the trial, Smith admitted that he had agreed to rough up Elizabeth Sennett but denied that he intended to kill her.
The jury voted 11 to 1 to give him a life sentence, but the execution judge overruled him.
How does he look back on his crime now, that it is only days from the second attempt to complete it.
“I wish I had done different things,” he said. “One second, one minute in a man’s life. And that was the only incident – I had no incident with officers, not one fight with prisoners, in 35 years. Violence is not who I am.”
But many people in Alabama, and across the US, believe that what he did deserves all the punishment he deserves. What does he say to them?
“I have been in prison for 35 years, how come I have not been punished? Thirty-five years,” he said. “I have not gone unpunished for 35 years. I suffered to do this. My children are as well.”
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The new method by which Alabama plans to kill Smith on Thursday called nitrogen hypoxia. It involves forcing the prisoner to breathe pure nitrogen, a gas that naturally exists in the air, at such a high concentration that it causes oxygen deprivation and eventual death.
Oklahoma, another active state on the death penalty, first embraced the idea in 2015. A criminal justice professor with no medical or scientific training made his primary claim to expertise as a former prosecutor in the scheme, according to the Marshall Project. Palau islands in the western Pacific Ocean – one of the smallest countries in the world, population 18,000.
After four hours of attempted judicial killing by lethal injection, Smith is looking into the unknown. When asked what he fears most about being administered nitrogen gas in the first execution of its kind, Smith first made a generic argument.
“I fear that it will succeed, and that a nitrogen system will soon be coming to your state. That’s what I’m worried about.”
There is really no mercy in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine
Smith has a point. Although never enacted, nitrogen enforcement is on the books in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma, and other states including Louisiana are considering it.
But that is a fear for someone who is so close to returning to the death chamber. Does he not have a personal fear?
“I try not to think about it. I try not to read too much,” he said.
Then he said: “Put up in that mask. Because if I do, brother, no one will help me. I’ll be drowning in my own vomit, and my wife will have to sit there and watch.”
There has been much discussion about the mask through which Alabama plans to pipe nitrogen into it. A federal judge described the contraption in a court document as “an industrial-grade air-supply respirator mask, with a five-point adjustable harness system and a flexible double-flange rubber seal that would fit tightly and hold the mask in place for the world. the person’s face – including the eyes, nose, mouth and chin”.
The danger, critics have pointed out, is that if the seal is not perfect, oxygen can seep into the mask and lead to a long, painful death. It’s also one thing to offer an industrial mask to a worker for his or her self-protection, it’s another thing entirely to apply it to someone who may be struggling and resisting to stay alive.
“I’m not participating,” Smith said, referring to his own execution. “I’m not going to, you know, grab the mask and strap it on, I’m not going to help them.”
The idea of cooperating with the Department of Corrections in his own death reminds Smith, he told the Guardian, of what guards told him as they tried to stick a giant needle under his collarbone during a botched execution in 2022. Smith recalled that he cried out in excruciating pain.
As he did so, the deputy warden who had a tight grip on his head nodded 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 approaches what is to come he must say goodbye a second time to those he loves the most. If the death goes ahead, his wife Deeanna will join him in the witness section of the death chamber, but he will have to have a final word beforehand with his 78-year-old mother Linda – “my little mum” – and his 12-year-old grandson Crimson, named after the University of Alabama football team.
“That is so, so hard. I’m putting them through this again, and I don’t know how we do it,” he said. “ has has has has has has has has has has has has been a lot to deal with, you know my family is great. We will get through.”
His lawyers are appealing to federal judges, arguing that the proposed use of nitrogen and the fact that Smith has already been traumatized by the failed attempt to kill him are prohibited forms of cruel and unusual punishment. under the US constitution. They are pushing to stop his execution, but at this last stage the sand in the hour glass is running out.
As the buzzer sounds to mark the end of 15 minutes, I squeeze in one last question. If he had a chance to say something to people in general, what would it be?
“You know, brother, I would say, ‘Leave room for mercy’. That doesn’t exist in Alabama. There is really no mercy in this country when it comes to difficult cases like mine.”
