Speaker 1: Pushkin previously on Revisionist History.
Speaker 2: He was taken out of the cell, thinking that his
Speaker 2: execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney, and he's asking,
Speaker 2: you know, the corrections officers who are with them, what's
Speaker 2: going on.
Speaker 3: You know, an antiseysiologist in good standing is not going
Speaker 3: to spend their wednesdays over at the you know, State
Speaker 3: corrections sticking ivs and people for execution.
Speaker 4: It's not something that we do.
Speaker 2: Because a cold blooded, convicted killer complains about the prodding
Speaker 2: and poking of a small abby.
Speaker 5: Line, really.
Speaker 2: Potting and proo with a needle. After three and a
Speaker 2: half or four hours being strapped to a gurney, you know,
Speaker 2: he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt, you know,
Speaker 2: change his clothes, do any of that without assistance.
Speaker 6: They attempted to kill him.
Speaker 5: On November seventeenth, his lawyers called me, I think ten
Speaker 5: days later. I didn't know them, They didn't know me,
Speaker 5: and they said, you know, we have a client who's
Speaker 5: had this thing happen. He's really struggling. Would you take
Speaker 5: a look at him? And we talked to him.
Speaker 4: In the months after his botched execution, Kenny Smith had
Speaker 4: a confidant Kate Porterfield a psychologist who specializes in trauma.
Speaker 4: She's consulted on dozens of row cases in her career,
Speaker 4: spent a lot of time at the US Military prison
Speaker 4: at Guantanamo Bay. Worked for years treating patients at the
Speaker 4: Clinic for Torture Victims at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. A
Speaker 4: very good friend of mine, Stephen, knows her well and
Speaker 4: told me one day, you have to meet my friend Kate.
Speaker 4: She has the strangest job in America. So I called
Speaker 4: her up and we began to talk with no real
Speaker 4: plan or agenda, And in one of our conversations, she
Speaker 4: told me about a case that I had never heard
Speaker 4: about before, and a person she'd been asked to evaluate
Speaker 4: who had affected her deeply, Kenny Smith. That's how I
Speaker 4: learned about the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Everything in this
Speaker 4: series began with my conversations with Cape Porterfield. So tell
Speaker 4: me about your first busy with Kenny.
Speaker 5: So my first contact with him was a call. Actually
Speaker 5: it was remarkably.
Speaker 6: Pleasant.
Speaker 5: Kenny was a very resilient man. He was you know,
Speaker 5: he had been on death row for thirty four years.
Speaker 5: This was a man used to living on death row
Speaker 5: and least to being in prison. And one of the
Speaker 5: things he said to me is, you know, he used
Speaker 5: to call me Doc. He'd said, Doc, I am very institutionalized.
Speaker 5: I know how to do this. I've made a life here.
Speaker 5: I have a very good set of friends here, and
Speaker 5: I have really good relationships on the outside. He had
Speaker 5: been married, he had children from before he went in,
Speaker 5: and he had relationships with his children. So he said
Speaker 5: to me, I'm very institutionalized. I've been through a lot,
Speaker 5: but I'm actually pretty stable. And he said, but I'm
Speaker 5: I'm falling apart right now from what happened.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think what now.
Speaker 5: What I think is he was signaling to me, I'm
Speaker 5: pretty sturdy, but this really messed me up.
Speaker 4: Kate Porderfield would end up spending many hours with Kenny
Speaker 4: Smith over the next year, looking to him on the phone,
Speaker 4: visiting him at home in prison, trying to understand what
Speaker 4: happened to him in that execution chamber on the night
Speaker 4: of November seventeenth, twenty twenty two, trying to figure out
Speaker 4: how damaged he had been by the experience, writing an
Speaker 4: assessment of his condition that could be used by his
Speaker 4: legal team in court, and most of all just trying
Speaker 4: to understand who he was. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 4: You're listening to the Alabama murders. In this installment, I
Speaker 4: want to look at Kenny Smith through the eyes of
Speaker 4: Cape Porterfield, to see the Kenny Smith that she saw
Speaker 4: in those many encounters between the end of twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two and the Long Winter of twenty twenty three. This
Speaker 4: is episode six, the Porterfield Sessions. In my third conversation
Speaker 4: with Cape Porterfield, well before we got to Kenny Smith,
Speaker 4: she told me about a patient she'd seen many years ago,
Speaker 4: an older man. This is when she was working at
Speaker 4: the Torture Clinic of Bellevue. He was a refugee from
Speaker 4: a war torn country. He'd been imprisoned, tortured, and at
Speaker 4: one point he had been subjected to a mock execution.
Speaker 4: He had been made to believe by his captors that
Speaker 4: he was about to die.
Speaker 5: So this was probably the first person I ever worked
Speaker 5: with who had had a mock execution, and it is
Speaker 5: its own unimaginable horror that leaves a really really bad physical, physiological,
Speaker 5: rather imprint.
Speaker 4: Her goal was to gently push him back towards his
Speaker 4: traumatic experience to better understand and to help him.
Speaker 5: He was very rigid and he would sit just really
Speaker 5: tightly wound in the sessions, really gripping the chair, and I.
Speaker 6: He didn't want to go there.
Speaker 4: It took a very long time to draw him out.
Speaker 4: She would go on to work with five or six
Speaker 4: other patients who had gone through something similar. A gun
Speaker 4: they thought was loaded, put to their head on to
Speaker 4: realize it was empty, being held underwater almost long enough,
Speaker 4: and even in one case, being left in a cage
Speaker 4: with a lion. She came to believe that this kind
Speaker 4: of experience deserved its own category. Why is a mock
Speaker 4: execution uniquely damaging?
Speaker 6: Let me say it this way.
Speaker 5: When someone says you're about to die, you know you're terrified,
Speaker 5: and terror doesn't even capture it. You're you know, most
Speaker 5: people lose control in some part of their body, maybe
Speaker 5: they're bladder or a bow.
Speaker 6: You know, there's usually.
Speaker 5: Incredible exclaiming of horror. You know, it's not good to
Speaker 5: think you're about to die. I mean, I've seen six
Speaker 5: people or whatever try to describe it to me, and
Speaker 5: they all fall apart. It's like I've never had someone
Speaker 5: say it the first time and not really fall apart.
Speaker 6: Like collapse and different ways.
Speaker 5: I had a guy who had been kidnapped and the
Speaker 5: soldiers came in and said, if we don't get the ransom,
Speaker 5: you know, we're going to kill you. And then they
Speaker 5: came in the next day and they had a gun
Speaker 5: and they put it to his head. This man was
Speaker 5: the most put together, disciplined, you know, kind of controlled guy,
Speaker 5: and when he tried to tell that moment, he just
Speaker 5: fell down in his chair and grabbed his head and
Speaker 5: he was like, my head's hurting, my head's urting.
Speaker 6: I can't, I can't.
Speaker 5: There's just this incredible physiological, you know, probably hormonal dump
Speaker 5: into his system of the same thing that happened, you know,
Speaker 5: when the mock execution took place. So essentially what trauma
Speaker 5: does is it becomes imprinted in your body and your
Speaker 5: memory banks are then linked and hooked up with the
Speaker 5: fear reaction.
Speaker 6: So that's the problem. It's a bad linkage.
Speaker 5: And so when you think about being told I'm about
Speaker 5: to kill you, and then you try to tell it,
Speaker 5: your body just goes it goes right into that state
Speaker 5: of terror.
Speaker 4: This is the first thing that Kate Porterfield saw when
Speaker 4: she sat down with Kenny Smith that he was in
Speaker 4: that special category, but his experience in some ways was
Speaker 4: even more overwhelming. This was not a mock execution. It
Speaker 4: was a botched execution, meaning it wasn't a trick. They
Speaker 4: were actually intending to execute Kenny. They just didn't manage
Speaker 4: to pull it off. And Kate was entreating someone years
Speaker 4: after it had occurred with Kenny Smith, this had just happened.
Speaker 6: This was different, you know.
Speaker 5: This was this very orchestrated, slow, systematic process being done
Speaker 5: by these guys all in this room who he knew,
Speaker 5: Guys who had been his guards for like some of
Speaker 5: them he knew something he didn't, but you know, guys
Speaker 5: he's known for a lot of years trying to kill him.
Speaker 6: Very hard to wrap your and around.
Speaker 4: How did the guards react?
Speaker 5: You know? I think that he believed they got very
Speaker 5: rattled and he watched it on their faces, but no
Speaker 5: one could do anything.
Speaker 6: And it's a scary narrative then of what.
Speaker 5: People will do with orders, right, Like I mean, there
Speaker 5: was a point, after all these poking of him with
Speaker 5: needles going around his feet, his arms, where they took
Speaker 5: the gurney and inverted it upwards with his feet up
Speaker 5: and left him there for I have to look, but
Speaker 5: I think it was upwards of twenty minutes, thirty minutes.
Speaker 5: They came back in and they t so then they
Speaker 5: started poking on his collar bunt. So they took this man.
Speaker 5: They tipped him upside down so that the blood would
Speaker 5: rush to a part of his body. They came back in,
Speaker 5: they injected him with something which he believes and we
Speaker 5: believe was probably a painkiller, and then they started going
Speaker 5: on his neck, you know, around his collar bun. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, but I don't imagine that a person who's
Speaker 5: doing that and witnessing it can walk away from that
Speaker 5: unscathed themselves.
Speaker 4: Kenny wanted to apologize to the Senate family and say
Speaker 4: goodbye to his own family, but he was all alone
Speaker 4: with the execution team. He thought they were killing him
Speaker 4: before the witnesses could get there.
Speaker 5: And he said one of the ways he stayed calm
Speaker 5: when there was all that dead time was he would
Speaker 5: he would say to himself, turn to the right, to
Speaker 5: the victim's family and apologize.
Speaker 6: Turn to the left, tell my family, I love him.
Speaker 6: So he would have this little practice.
Speaker 5: To the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you,
Speaker 5: And he said that kind of helped him pass the time,
Speaker 5: which also was like remarkable to me. He was thinking,
Speaker 5: thinking about how you're managing, like how you're gonna choreograph this.
Speaker 6: They come back in, they begin to untie the.
Speaker 5: Tourniquet on his arm, and they say it's over now.
Speaker 5: And then one of the people on the team who
Speaker 5: he did no says to him, it's over and I'll
Speaker 5: be praying for you. So these kinds of moments for
Speaker 5: Kenny were just what's the word unmanageable. Afterwards, they were
Speaker 5: unmanageable moments with other humans.
Speaker 4: One minute they were trying to kill him, then they
Speaker 4: weren't trying to kill him.
Speaker 5: It's very confusing. And then the man, you know, references God.
Speaker 5: Kenny's you know, most core faith right is his belief
Speaker 5: in God and his belief that because of his faith,
Speaker 5: you know, he had really been saved. I'm not talking
Speaker 5: about saved in the execution. I'm saying saved as a man,
Speaker 5: you know, his faith saved him. So this collision of
Speaker 5: people trying to kill you, your body being in something
Speaker 5: that we don't really understand unless you've had unless you
Speaker 5: thought you were going to die, and then someone bringing
Speaker 5: God in and saying this sort of generous thing, I'm
Speaker 5: going to pray for you. It was it like the
Speaker 5: word unmanageable is what I keep coming up with. He
Speaker 5: couldn't grasp it, and he couldn't he couldn't deal with
Speaker 5: it after. I mean, there were many things that made
Speaker 5: in distress, but that was one. You know, the warden
Speaker 5: taking his head and saying this is this is what's
Speaker 5: best for you was another.
Speaker 4: Kate Porderfield would end up having seventeen marathon phone sessions
Speaker 4: with Kenny Smith, and she would twice fly down to
Speaker 4: Alabama to meet with him in person, and after he
Speaker 4: had told her the story of what happened on November seventeenth,
Speaker 4: he told her the story of his life in the
Speaker 4: years leading up to the murder of Elizabeth Sennett. That's
Speaker 4: after the brain. Kenny Smith's full name was Kenneth Eugene Smith.
Speaker 4: Both Kenny and his brother Joey were named for their father,
Speaker 4: a truck driver named Wesley Eugene Smith.
Speaker 7: Did you ever naming the matter? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Linda Smith, Kenny Smith's mom, still lives in the shoals.
Speaker 4: She spoke with Lee Hedgspeth, a local reporter who knew
Speaker 4: Kenny well and covered his case.
Speaker 7: Has he passed now, Jane, Oh he is, Yeah, Hey,
Speaker 7: I think he was forty five when he passed.
Speaker 4: Linda and Jean had five children together in quick succession.
Speaker 4: Kenny was the eldest.
Speaker 7: He didn't really want a child that at that point.
Speaker 8: Why do you think that was?
Speaker 7: I just I don't know. I guess he wouldn't through
Speaker 7: with his wild oats, I guess.
Speaker 8: So tell me about the wild oats.
Speaker 7: Not too much of a drinker, more of like pills.
Speaker 7: Back then, it was kind of uppers and downers.
Speaker 4: Jean was on the road a lot. He had another
Speaker 4: relationship then that says it was with an underage girl.
Speaker 4: Jean got her pregnant, but he still came around to
Speaker 4: see Linda, to sleep with her or just to hit her.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, he always did that, just about I mean,
Speaker 7: not when we first started dating. It started. I guess
Speaker 7: it started after Kenny was born. You know what I
Speaker 7: think is he was doing stuff and he was thinking
Speaker 7: I was, you know, he was jealous. Yeah, but I wasn't,
Speaker 7: you know, I had a kid to raise. I mean,
Speaker 7: he would just hit me in the head and I
Speaker 7: mean I still got a scar right there. Where he
Speaker 7: through a bottle at me and right here. It may
Speaker 7: have been gone now, but it was just you know,
Speaker 7: hit me, knocked me in the floor, slappen me. We'll see,
Speaker 7: like I said, he thought that I was you know,
Speaker 7: out doing stuff and partying, and like I said, which
Speaker 7: I wasn't.
Speaker 8: And can you recall, like, for example, the incident with
Speaker 8: the bottle, Can you tell me what happened then? Do
Speaker 8: you remember?
Speaker 7: Yeah? I mean, I I mean I didn't know he
Speaker 7: was coming in there that which it didn't matter, but
Speaker 7: I was at home, you know, and a friend of
Speaker 7: mine for work was just there with me, and Kenny
Speaker 7: was there and he just came in and he was
Speaker 7: just enraged that night.
Speaker 8: Do you remember what Kenny's reaction would be when that's happening.
Speaker 8: How old is Kenny around this time?
Speaker 7: I remember that time, He's probably throughfore, I mean its run,
Speaker 7: get up on the couch and sit ye and Joeyan
Speaker 7: just you know.
Speaker 8: Do you remember anything that Kenny ever said to you,
Speaker 8: either when the abuse was happening or afterward?
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, I mean he would I mean, you know,
Speaker 7: and hug me, and you know, I guess you don't.
Speaker 7: I guess they was telling me, you know, everything would
Speaker 7: be okay.
Speaker 4: Kenny would draw pictures and give them to his mom.
Speaker 4: Kenny's sentencing hearing, a series of witnesses testified about Jeane's abuse.
Speaker 4: One was a woman who worked as a waitress with Linda.
Speaker 4: Jean would come into the restaurant when Linda was working.
Speaker 4: This is what she said, Well, he would take what
Speaker 4: money Linda had made in tips, and if she did
Speaker 4: not make what he thought he needed, she would get
Speaker 4: slapped and beat around right in the restaurant. He would
Speaker 4: walk in and he would tell her he needed to
Speaker 4: talk to her. Well, she would walk off into a
Speaker 4: private place with him, which was around the corner in
Speaker 4: the hall, and the next thing, you know, you would
Speaker 4: hear this commotion and he would be beating her. He
Speaker 4: would slap her and he would hit her with his fist.
Speaker 4: I have seen him back her up in the corner
Speaker 4: and just beating her. And I have seen her when
Speaker 4: her pocket would be torn on the uniform where he
Speaker 4: had taken the money out of it. Question and how
Speaker 4: often would he come around? Answer? Well, at least three,
Speaker 4: two to three times a week that happened. He always
Speaker 4: made a point to hit her around the eyes, The
Speaker 4: fifth of the children Linda and Jean had together was Michael,
Speaker 4: who died a few hours after birth. His lungs never developed.
Speaker 4: In testimony, Kenny's brother Joey said, quote, well, he blamed
Speaker 4: mother for it and said it was her fault, and
Speaker 4: pretty soon, you know, she felt bad, even kind of
Speaker 4: accepted the blame and started drinking real heavy. Question does
Speaker 4: your mom drink now today? Answer no. Kenny, Joey said
Speaker 4: in his testimony, was the one taking care of her.
Speaker 4: He would be in there with a cold rag on
Speaker 4: her head, cleaning up the vomit out of the floor
Speaker 4: when she missed the commode, and trying to wrestle her
Speaker 4: up out of the floor to get her in the
Speaker 4: bed because she was a big woman. Question how old
Speaker 4: do you think Kenny was the first time that you
Speaker 4: saw him picking your mama up and talking to her
Speaker 4: and wiping her How old do you think he was?
Speaker 4: Answer probably eight or nine. Question did there ever come
Speaker 4: a time when you saw your brother turn to drinking? Answer? Oh, yes.
Speaker 4: Question do you remember how old he was? Answer he
Speaker 4: was sixteen. Question did there ever come a time when
Speaker 4: you saw your brother start to drink too much? Answer yes,
Speaker 4: Kenny met a woman. They had a child together, Michael,
Speaker 4: named for Kenny's brother who died. They moved to a
Speaker 4: house in Florence, and one day a friend of his
Speaker 4: from high school asked him if he wanted a little
Speaker 4: quick money roughing someone up and off He and John
Speaker 4: Parker went in Parker's Pontiac Grand Prix with a hunting
Speaker 4: knife and a fifth of wild turkey on the console
Speaker 4: between them to do what he had seen people do
Speaker 4: one hundred times in his life. Kate Porterfield and I
Speaker 4: sometimes digressed into more personal subjects. We talked a lot
Speaker 4: about our kids and parenting, what she had learned as
Speaker 4: a mother of three daughters. And there was something she
Speaker 4: said at one point that I can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 6: You know, Catherine Harrison, You know that is she's a
Speaker 6: great writer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and she she wrote this incredible memoir about her
Speaker 5: life with her father who had disappeared and then got
Speaker 5: involved with her in incredibly inappropriate way.
Speaker 6: And it was a beautiful, very painful memoir, very brave.
Speaker 6: And she has a line in there.
Speaker 5: I'm going to get it wrong, but where she says,
Speaker 5: we think that parenting is about unconditional love, and what
Speaker 5: we mean by that is that the parents have unconditional
Speaker 5: love towards the children. But what you learn as you
Speaker 5: grow and as you have kids is that actually the
Speaker 5: unconditional love is coming from the child to the parent.
Speaker 5: And I will say I see that all the time
Speaker 5: in my patients who got abused as children, which is
Speaker 5: they love their parents. They're hungry for their parents. They
Speaker 5: yearned for the memory of their parent to be the
Speaker 5: good parts. And it doesn't matter that the parents did
Speaker 5: terrible things to them.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: No, I mean, it matters to who they've become.
Speaker 5: But in their sense of self, oh, I see, they'll
Speaker 5: yearn for that parent. Children have an unconditional My point is,
Speaker 5: children have an unconditional love of the parent.
Speaker 4: When Kate Porterfield was just out of college, she had
Speaker 4: been attacked by a stranger. He took her by surprise
Speaker 4: and beat her up. She suffered from what she now
Speaker 4: realizes was PTSD. It took her years to recover. That
Speaker 4: experience was one of the reasons she developed such an
Speaker 4: interest in treating trauma. She had no connection to her attacker,
Speaker 4: though no reason to return to him, it was possible
Speaker 4: to understand ultimately that this was just a case of
Speaker 4: being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But
Speaker 4: what if he wasn't a stranger. What if you loved
Speaker 4: your attacker, And what if your love was so powerful
Speaker 4: and instinctual that you couldn't help yourself that you kept
Speaker 4: coming back again and again, hoping things might be different.
Speaker 4: I think that's another kind of suffering that deserves its
Speaker 4: own category.
Speaker 5: I can't tell you how many the moms of my
Speaker 5: clients were sexually abused. I can't tell you. It's incredible,
Speaker 5: you know, and you just go, It's just perpetrating and
Speaker 5: perpetrating and perpetrating through generations.
Speaker 4: I'm curious about what it is you said that dealing
Speaker 4: with these repeated cases if people who had been through
Speaker 4: this kind of childhood experience, Yeah, taught you a lot.
Speaker 4: I want to put my finger on what it taught you.
Speaker 5: I understood child development. I'd trained in child psychology, and
Speaker 5: I was like, you know, pretty good on it.
Speaker 6: But when you see it.
Speaker 5: Go wrong, you really then understand what it takes for
Speaker 5: it to go right. And so watching again and again,
Speaker 5: men grown men sitting across from me, cover with tattoos,
Speaker 5: you know, guys who had killed a couple people, maybe
Speaker 5: crying watching these men sobbing when they recounted being eight
Speaker 5: years old and being here's one and I'll frame carefully,
Speaker 5: but you know, raped at age eight multiple times by
Speaker 5: an older family member, and this you know, person who
Speaker 5: had committed homicides, no question, sobbing talking about it. That
Speaker 5: was so powerful for me in getting me to understand
Speaker 5: that this guy is sitting across from me who is quote
Speaker 5: unquote scary to everybody in the world. And he looks scary. Right,
Speaker 5: he is a hurt person. If you go all the
Speaker 5: way back, he's a hurt little boy, and he's now
Speaker 5: got warrior He's got warrior shit all over himself, right,
Speaker 5: he's got armor, he's got tattoos over his face. He's
Speaker 5: so bad ass and he hurts people, right, and it
Speaker 5: all if you can kind of back channel it and
Speaker 5: go back in time, he was a little boy who
Speaker 5: had happened to him.
Speaker 6: He was really really harmed.
Speaker 4: In this hypothetical, semi hypothetical case of the guy with
Speaker 4: the tattoos. Yeah, uh, how often in his life do
Speaker 4: you think he talked about that childhood abuse to somebody?
Speaker 6: Never hed ever, never talked about it.
Speaker 4: More to the point, no one bothered to ask him
Speaker 4: until she did.
Speaker 5: And then I went and visited his family and interviewed
Speaker 5: all these relatives. It was one hundred percent known. Everybody
Speaker 5: knew this older relative sexually abused kids in the family,
Speaker 5: and particularly had done so with this child. Nothing ever done.
Speaker 5: Imagine no treatment, no assessment, no law enforcement, nothing. Now
Speaker 5: imagine what that does to that kid. Think about the
Speaker 5: growing sense of yourself. I'm gonna get hurt by this person.
Speaker 5: Everyone's gonna know. People are terrifying. They hurt you, and
Speaker 5: there's no recourse ever anywhere.
Speaker 4: The waitress who worked with Kenny's mother remembered this detail
Speaker 4: about Kenny's interactions with his dad at the trial. She said,
Speaker 4: you did not see him go to Jeane or like,
Speaker 4: you know, like a child usually runs up to his
Speaker 4: daddy and approaches him, that he was glad to see him,
Speaker 4: or that his daddy was glad to see him. At first,
Speaker 4: when I read that, I thought she meant that the
Speaker 4: tragedy of Kenny and Jane was that Kenny didn't want
Speaker 4: to run up and hug his father. But after talking
Speaker 4: to Kate Porterfield, I realized, No, it's much worse. It's
Speaker 4: that he wanted to run up and hug his father,
Speaker 4: but understood even at that age that that was impossible.
Speaker 4: Kenny Smith's crime was not committed in isolation. It was
Speaker 4: a violent act that came at the end of a
Speaker 4: long cascade.
Speaker 5: We like people to either be victims or bad guys, right,
Speaker 5: and so victims are people that things happened to, and
Speaker 5: people who do bad things are just people who do
Speaker 5: bad things. And the area that I think were woefully missing,
Speaker 5: as especially in criminal justice, is seeing that people who
Speaker 5: do things that are against the law or even violent
Speaker 5: or even murder are usually or frequently doing that themselves
Speaker 5: having suffered really bad harm, hurt, maltreatment, abuse, violence. People
Speaker 5: have a hard time recognizing that a lot of bad
Speaker 5: behaviors come out of trauma too.
Speaker 4: At the very beginning of this series, I played an
Speaker 4: excerpt of part of my conversation with Kate Porterfield. It
Speaker 4: was about the first time she saw Kenny Smith in
Speaker 4: person at home in prison in December of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: about a month after the botched execution. And now I
Speaker 4: want to play it again because now I think it
Speaker 4: will make more sense, It will be easier to see
Speaker 4: why this case, out of the many Kate Porterfield has
Speaker 4: done affected her so deeply.
Speaker 5: When I first went to see Kenny, he wanted to
Speaker 5: talk for the first probably two hours of our visit
Speaker 5: about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he
Speaker 5: received from his family as he was going into the execution.
Speaker 6: That's what he wanted to start with.
Speaker 5: And I found this so powerful and also fascinating honestly
Speaker 5: as a clinician, because what I first thought was, Oh,
Speaker 5: he's avoiding, right, he can't talk about the execution. He
Speaker 5: spent a lot of time telling me the story of
Speaker 5: everything else, the goodbyes, the phone calls, the last meal,
Speaker 5: what people said to him. I mean, he went through
Speaker 5: each family member, his grandson, his mom. So he told
Speaker 5: me all about his last visit with her and saying
Speaker 5: goodbye to her, her walking out of the visiting room
Speaker 5: and turning back to him, you know, and.
Speaker 6: It was all about love.
Speaker 5: He talked to me about love for probably two two
Speaker 5: and a half hours, so he really kind of got me.
Speaker 5: He made me really pause and think a lot, Kenny Smith,
Speaker 5: because watching someone only start from a place of love
Speaker 5: after something so hard was I'd never seen that before.
Speaker 4: You don't think he was avoiding the.
Speaker 6: Subject well, I think he was in a way.
Speaker 5: I think both were true, and I would and I
Speaker 5: ultimately we got to know each other well, and I
Speaker 5: could tease him a little and say, you know, you know,
Speaker 5: you got the gift of gab, Kenny, you're really good
Speaker 5: at like keeping me off the stuff that and he
Speaker 5: would just laugh and say, oh, yeah, I don't want
Speaker 5: to go there. I don't want to go there, Doc.
Speaker 5: And he would say, I get nauseous, I start sweating,
Speaker 5: I can't do it. Don't make me do it, Doc.
Speaker 5: So like we got to a place where we knew
Speaker 5: what avoidance was. But I don't think that's.
Speaker 6: The whole ballgame.
Speaker 5: I think what really happened is that I got to
Speaker 5: have this time with this man who thought he was
Speaker 5: about to die and had a pre death experience of
Speaker 5: intense love.
Speaker 4: There's a famous quote from the Arc critic John Ruskin,
Speaker 4: hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,
Speaker 4: but thousands can think for one who can see. After
Speaker 4: a lifetime working with people who had suffered great trauma,
Speaker 4: Kate Porterfield was the one who could see. And what
Speaker 4: she saw was a very different version of Kenny Smith,
Speaker 4: someone in pain over what had happened and what was
Speaker 4: to come.
Speaker 5: And he was just having severe nightmares of being executed
Speaker 5: over and over.
Speaker 6: So he was really tormented at night.
Speaker 5: Then during the day he'd be exhausted, he had a
Speaker 5: ton of nausea, and he had a lot of images
Speaker 5: coming back to him over and over again. And then
Speaker 5: on top of that starts the meaning making, and the
Speaker 5: meaning making started to really be dark. After, you know,
Speaker 5: several weeks, he started to really think about what had happened,
Speaker 5: that these people who he knew had done it.
Speaker 6: To him, How can people.
Speaker 5: Do this to other people? You know, he started to
Speaker 5: get really and then he got depressed. He just got
Speaker 5: full undepressed. He was actually doing pretty much post traumatic
Speaker 5: stress symptoms at first, and then he moved into depression
Speaker 5: in the spring, and then that kind of worsened for
Speaker 5: a while and then he sort of came out of
Speaker 5: the depression and then the second execution came up.
Speaker 4: The second execution, the State of Alabama wasn't finished with
Speaker 4: Kenny Smith coming up on the series finale of the
Speaker 4: Alabama Murders.
Speaker 7: They said, well, mom, they're coming to Kidney and you know,
Speaker 7: weisted our good pass and you know, the life the
Speaker 7: thing he said, was I love you, Mom, I've got
Speaker 7: to go.
Speaker 3: So the theory was that because nitrogen gas was not noxious,
Speaker 3: it would be could be given to some one as
Speaker 3: a kind of, you know, method of gas execution that
Speaker 3: would not be so troubling to them because they would
Speaker 3: breathe it and not know it and if they would
Speaker 3: then lose consciousness and die.
Speaker 2: I'm not a medical person. I can't opine on the
Speaker 2: on what happened. The only one who can tell us
Speaker 2: if he experienced pain and is not here to describe it.
Speaker 4: But what I observed.
Speaker 2: Anyhow, did not look like what Alabama had advertised.
Speaker 4: Revisionous History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, bend A daf Haffrey,
Speaker 4: Anina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Benda daf Haffrey and
Speaker 4: Lee Hedgebeth. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact checking by
Speaker 4: Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support
Speaker 4: from Luke LeMond. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Original scoring
Speaker 4: by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bott. Sound
Speaker 4: design and additional music by Jake Gorski him Malcolm Gladmam.
Speaker 4: You can get this entire season now add free by
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