On Tuesday morning, Kenneth Smith will be transferred inside Holman Prison, Alabama, to “death row,” the bluntly named cell where condemned prisoners are placed two days before their scheduled execution.
Smith knows the cell well. He knows the dimensions and feel of the place. He knows it is just twenty feet away from the death chamber where, barring a last-minute delay, he will be escorted in handcuffs and leg irons on Thursday before being strapped to a stretcher to await his fate.
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He knows because he’s been on death row before. In November 2022, the Alabama Department of Corrections placed him there as they prepared to execute him by lethal injection.
From 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 a stretcher while prison officials tried in vain to find a vein.
He was hung upside down for several minutes while officials worked frantically to secure an IV line. By the time officials admitted defeat and canceled the execution, his body was riddled with holes.
In doing so, Smith gained access to an exceptionally elite, but extremely undesirable club with only two members: Americans who can describe what it’s like to survive an execution.
Now, just fourteen months later, he is about to be put back on death row, where he will have to experience it all again. Only this time the protocol is different.
Smith, 58, will be executed using an untested method never before used in capital punishment in the US. It is a technique that has been rejected by veterinarians on ethical grounds for the euthanasia of most animals, with the exception of pigs: death by nitrogen gas.
This week, Smith contacted the Guardian from Holman Prison and spent his allotted 15 minutes on outside phone calls describing the surreal position he now finds himself in. He is an execution survivor who is about to go through execution procedures a second time, through an entirely untried method.
Under these circumstances, is he prepared within himself for his imminent return to death row?
“I’m not ready for that. In no way. I’m just not ready yet, brother,” he said.
In the aftermath of Smith’s botched execution, he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed a cocktail of medications, including drugs to control migraines. His prison psychiatrist has diagnosed him with insomnia, anxiety and depression – symptoms that often accompany severe trauma.
He told the Guardian he couldn’t sleep because of frequent nightmares and the ‘what-if games you play in the middle of the night’. After the first execution attempt, he said, he had a recurring nightmare in which he was escorted back to the death chamber.
“All I had to do was walk into the room in the dream before it was overwhelming. “I was absolutely terrified,” he said. “It just kept coming.”
Since he was given a second execution date of January 25, he has had a whole new set of nightmares.
“I dream that they will come for me,” he said.
As his second brush with the execution chamber draws closer, he feels his physical and mental condition worsen. He said he is “sick to his stomach” and is gagging most days. The nurse in the infirmary put it down to stress.
Smith has an unusual way of conveying the trauma-on-trauma he is exposed to.
“They didn’t give me a chance to heal,” he said. “I’m still bothered by the first execution and now we’re 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 straight back by the abuser into the hostile environment that had originally traumatized them.
“Anyone who did that would probably be seen as a monster,” he said. “But if the government does it, you know, that’s a different thing.”
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On March 18, 1988, the wife of a pastor in Colbert County, Alabama, Elizabeth Sennett was stabbed to death in her home. A week later, her husband, Charles Sennett, a minister in the Church of Christ, committed suicide after detectives began focusing on the fact that he had had an affair, was deeply in debt and had in turn taken out a life insurance policy. woman.
Smith was one of two people hired through an intermediary for the murder and paid $1,000 each. During the trial, Smith admitted that he had agreed to beat up Elizabeth Sennett, but denied that he intended to kill her.
The jury voted 11 to 1 to give him a life sentence, but they were overruled by the judge who sent him to death row.
How does he look back on his crime now, now that he is just days away from a second execution attempt.
“I wish I had done things differently,” he said. “One second, one moment in a man’s life. And that’s been the only incident – I haven’t had a single incident with officers, not a single fight with inmates in 35 years. Violence is not who I am.”
Yet many people in Alabama and across the U.S. believe that because of what he has done, he deserves whatever punishment awaits him. What does he say to them?
“I have been in prison for 35 years, how have I not been punished? Thirty-five years,” he said. “I have not gone unpunished for 35 years. I have suffered from doing this. That also applies to my family.”
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The new method Alabama uses to kill Smith on Thursday is known as nitrogen hypoxia. It involves forcing the prisoner to inhale pure nitrogen, a gas that occurs naturally in the air, in such high concentrations that it causes oxygen deprivation and ultimately death.
The idea was initially adopted by Oklahoma, another active death penalty state, in 2015. The plan was devised, the Marshall Project found, by a criminal justice professor with no medical or scientific training, whose main claim to expertise was as a former prison prosecutor . Palau, the islands in the western Pacific Ocean – one of the smallest countries in the world, with 18,000 inhabitants.
After four hours of witnessing an attempted judicial murder by lethal injection, Smith now investigates the unknown. When asked what he fears most about potentially being injected with nitrogen gas in the first performance of its kind, Smith initially offered a general argument.
“I fear it will be successful, and a nitrogen system will soon come to your country. That’s what I’m worried about.”
Mercy truly does not exist in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine
Smith has a point. Although never carried out, execution by nitrogen is on the books in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma, and other states, including Louisiana, are considering it.
But that’s a pretty rare fear for someone so close to returning to the death chamber. Does he have no personal fears?
“I try not to think about it. I try not to read too much,” he said.
Then he added, “Throw up in that mask. Because if I do that, brother, no one will help me. I’m going to drown in my own vomit, and my wife is going to have to sit there and watch.”
There has been a lot of discussion about the mask Alabama uses to divert nitrogen to him. A federal judge described the device in a court document as an “industrial-grade respirator with continuous power supply, an adjustable five-point harness system, and a flexible double-flange rubber seal that would fit snugly and retain the mask throughout its length.” the wearer’s face – including eyes, nose, mouth and chin”.
The danger, critics warn, is that if the seal is not perfect, oxygen can seep into the mask and lead to a prolonged and painful death. Also, it is one thing to offer a worker an industrial mask for his or her self-protection, it is quite another to force it on 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 that he would cooperate with the corrections department in his own demise reminds Smith, he told the Guardian, of what guards said to him when they tried to insert a giant needle under his collarbone during the botched execution in 2022. Smith recalled remembering himself crying out in excruciating pain.
As he did so, the deputy director, who was holding his head tightly, leaned toward 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 braces himself for what’s to come is having to say goodbye to those he loves most for a second time. Should the execution go ahead, his wife Deeanna will be with 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 mama’ – and his 12-year-old grandson Crimson , named after the University of Alabama football team.
“That’s so, so hard. “I’m making them go through this again, and I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” he said. “I have a tough group with me, you know my family is great. We will get through it.”
His lawyers are appealing to federal judges, arguing that both the proposed use of nitrogen and the fact that Smith is already traumatized by the failed attempt to kill him are forms of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited under the U.S. Constitution. They are pushing for a stay of execution, although at this late stage the sand in the hourglass is running out.
As the buzzer sounds to signal the end of 15 minutes, I squeeze in one last question. If he had the chance to say something to the general public, what would it be?
“You know, brother, I would say, ‘Leave room for grace.’ That just doesn’t exist in Alabama. Mercy truly does not exist in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine.”