Speaker 1: Pushkin previously on revisionist history. I think there was a
Speaker 1: pressure to have a method that looked more humane than
Speaker 1: electrocution and lethal gas on.
Speaker 2: That van and I go back to the hotel where
Speaker 2: the other people had been in there praying with his family,
Speaker 2: and I have to go in and tell him.
Speaker 3: You know, John's gone, and.
Speaker 2: He was peaceful.
Speaker 4: He didn't appear to suffer. This is how lethal injection
Speaker 4: actually kills you. It kills you by burning your lungs up,
Speaker 4: and you're also paralyzed, so you can't complain that this
Speaker 4: is happening.
Speaker 3: Good afternoon, everybody, Thank you for being here. I hope
Speaker 3: everybody had a one full holiday. If I haven't seen
Speaker 3: you since, then call this press conference today because I
Speaker 3: believe that people of Alabama deserve an explanation on where
Speaker 3: things stand and where I stand with regard to capital
Speaker 3: punishment in our state.
Speaker 5: It's early December twenty twenty two, Montgomery, Alabama. Steve Marshall,
Speaker 5: the state's attorney General, is holding a press conference standing
Speaker 5: at the podium flanked by the Alabama and American flags.
Speaker 3: What occurred on November seventeenth was a travesty, but not
Speaker 3: for the reasons that many death penalty opponents and death
Speaker 3: row sympathizers would have the public to believe.
Speaker 5: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to the Alabama
Speaker 5: Murders our series on the Elizabeth Sennet case. This is
Speaker 5: episode five, Cruel and Unusual. It's about the second of
Speaker 5: her assailants, Kenny Smith, and what was done to him
Speaker 5: in the name of justice travesty of November seventeenth. Kenny
Speaker 5: Smith was twenty two at the time of Elizabeth sentence murderer.
Speaker 5: He had a girlfriend and two young children. He was
Speaker 5: working in a factory. He was slight, skinny, dark hair, thick,
Speaker 5: moon shaped eyebrows. He was drunk a lot and high,
Speaker 5: but all was smiling.
Speaker 2: They would come over to my house a lot and
Speaker 2: Keenie would it would just be granted because Michael will
Speaker 2: be sitting in the back seat in his car seat,
Speaker 2: and that Kenny would be high. You know, they would
Speaker 2: be drinking.
Speaker 5: This is Linda Smith, Kenny's mom, talking with a local
Speaker 5: reporter named Lee Hedgepeth. Lee has covered the Kenny Smith
Speaker 5: case and knows his family. Well, what kind of drunk.
Speaker 2: Was skinny Hey with a happy drunk? Yeah, it's hard
Speaker 2: to think of Kenny is anything. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: what you're saying is what you get with him.
Speaker 5: On the evening after the attack on Elizabeth Sennett, Smith's
Speaker 5: best friend came over to his house. They went out
Speaker 5: to get beer. Kenny's hand was swollen. He hit it
Speaker 5: wrapped in a bandage. On the way to the store,
Speaker 5: Kenny kept saying, I messed up. I messed up. He
Speaker 5: wouldn't say why. Then back at home he started crying.
Speaker 5: His mother lived close by. In the days that followed
Speaker 5: before the police caught up to him, he went to
Speaker 5: see her.
Speaker 2: And Kenny, you know, like I said, he would come
Speaker 2: over during that time. I mean I look back on
Speaker 2: the times that he would come over and uh, he
Speaker 2: would be kind of distant, you know, and he would
Speaker 2: just I mean, it's disliked. It was something he wanted
Speaker 2: to tail me, but you know he never did. So
Speaker 2: when do you find out that he's implicated.
Speaker 1: In some way?
Speaker 2: Well I find out one afternoon when he calls me, oh,
Speaker 2: thank you just got home from work and they came
Speaker 2: and he said, Mom, can you come pick up Michael?
Speaker 2: And I said, well, I'm washing my hair right now.
Speaker 2: I said, I can't write this minute, and he said, well, Mom,
Speaker 2: can you come? He said, the police are here, and
Speaker 2: I just thought it was, you know, for pot or
Speaker 2: drugs or something like that, and I said, well, you know,
Speaker 2: I'll be over there, you know, and just a mente.
Speaker 2: Of course, it didn't take me long to get to
Speaker 2: their house. And when I drove up over there in
Speaker 2: that driveway, I bet you there was ten ten cars
Speaker 2: out in front.
Speaker 5: Kenny Smith met the same fate as his friend John Parker,
Speaker 5: who you heard about in the last episode. Smith was
Speaker 5: charged with murder, can victed, sentenced by the jury to
Speaker 5: life without pearl by a vote of eleven to one,
Speaker 5: and then his judge did the same thing John Parker's
Speaker 5: judge did, overrode the jury's decision and sentenced him to death.
Speaker 5: He got sent to home in prison and stayed there
Speaker 5: for decades, appealing his sentence, delaying the inevitable until November seventeenth,
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two, when the event that the Attorney General
Speaker 5: of the State of Alabama called a travesty happened.
Speaker 3: It's been a great deal of media coverage, both local
Speaker 3: and national, about what happened in Kenney Smith's execution chamber.
Speaker 3: Much of that coverage has seemingly been openly sympathetic to
Speaker 3: Smith and his cause, even with some going so far
Speaker 3: as to advocate for the abolishment of the death penalty.
Speaker 3: And on what basis exactly because a cold blooded, convicted
Speaker 3: killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small
Speaker 3: abvy line really potting and poking with a needle.
Speaker 5: Prodding and poking with a needle, Let's start there. The
Speaker 5: state of Alabama has a detailed set of instructions for
Speaker 5: how executions are to be carried out in their prisons,
Speaker 5: a protocol. The protocol was not supposed to be a
Speaker 5: public document, but Alabama was forced to disclose it during
Speaker 5: a death Bentley court case. It's forty one pages of dry,
Speaker 5: precise language stipulating every step of the process. When a
Speaker 5: condemned prisoner is supposed to be moved to a special
Speaker 5: holding cell, when he gets his last meal, what he
Speaker 5: gets to have in his cell, The people who are
Speaker 5: allowed to attend the execution, where the victim's family goes,
Speaker 5: where the offenders group goes, things like that. The execution
Speaker 5: team is made up of about a dozen people. It
Speaker 5: is a captain. The team is supposed to do a
Speaker 5: walk through in the week leading up to the execution,
Speaker 5: batting practice, if you will, to make sure they have
Speaker 5: the killing procedure down pat As you may remember from
Speaker 5: the last episode, the seed of the idea behind lethal
Speaker 5: injection came from Ronald Reagan, who said, why don't we
Speaker 5: just execute people the same way we put down horses,
Speaker 5: to use the veterinarian's' euphemism, put them to sleep, clean, quick, professional,
Speaker 5: something that appears painless instead of all the messiness of
Speaker 5: the electric chair. That's very much the spirit of the
Speaker 5: Alabama protocol.
Speaker 4: What was so I think effective about lethal injection and
Speaker 4: sinister is the fact that when you observe an execution
Speaker 4: with lethal injection, generally it's a pretty bloodless event. Not
Speaker 4: much happens. It appears that a person kind of closes
Speaker 4: their eyes. Maybe you can imagine that they fall asleep,
Speaker 4: and then they're dead.
Speaker 5: Jill Zivitt the intensive care specialist from Emory University in
Speaker 5: Atlanta who fell into death boalty work a few years ago.
Speaker 4: So this was a breakthrough in terms of the witness
Speaker 4: experience because every other kind of execution method that had
Speaker 4: ever occurred before then, you know, it was quite a
Speaker 4: lot more graphic, but lethal injection seemed to solve the
Speaker 4: problem of being outwardly peaceful, and that's why I think
Speaker 4: lethal injection took cold. And on top of that, of course,
Speaker 4: there was this kind of impersonation of a medical act.
Speaker 4: There was the use of terminology of medicine and even
Speaker 4: the use of physicians and other medical people which gave
Speaker 4: this kind of extra impression. You know that this was legitimate,
Speaker 4: an endorsed kind of activity.
Speaker 5: Which brings us to the portion of the protocol at issue.
Speaker 5: On the evening of November seventeenth, twenty twenty two, in
Speaker 5: Section B Part one, Clause A quote, the IV team
Speaker 5: will be escorted into the execution chamber to start the IV.
Speaker 5: The heart monitor leads will be applied to the condemned inmate.
Speaker 5: If the condemned inmates veins make obtaining venus access difficult
Speaker 5: or problematic, qualified medical personnel may perform a central line
Speaker 5: procedure as set forth in section two of Appendix B
Speaker 5: ADEOC Lethal injection execution procedure. A central line procedure involves
Speaker 5: inserting a long, thin, flexible tube into a large vein,
Speaker 5: like the jugular vein in the neck or the subclavian
Speaker 5: vein in the chest or the femoral vein in the thigh.
Speaker 5: So you try for the arm the normal way, and
Speaker 5: if you fail, you go for a big vein. That's
Speaker 5: the plan. Only in real life things aren't always so straightforward,
Speaker 5: as outlined in Section B, Part one, Clause A in
Speaker 5: a case of Kenny Smith and in other cases, there
Speaker 5: have been these initial problems in finding a vein.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I want to talk about this with you.
Speaker 5: You talk about this because I yeah, as a non
Speaker 5: medical person, I'm I'm puzzled. I don't understand this.
Speaker 4: Sure, Yeah, So you walked me through.
Speaker 5: Why why is that hard?
Speaker 4: Alabama, you know, was the poster child of failure for
Speaker 4: this in a in an odd kind of cluster of cases.
Speaker 4: And and to answer your question directly, why is it hard? Well,
Speaker 4: it's hard because in order to put an intravenous into
Speaker 4: a vein, you know, it requires a certain you know,
Speaker 4: level of skill, and it also requires some cooperation. You know,
Speaker 4: it hurts to stick someone with a needle. So in
Speaker 4: someone who is sort of young and fit and well
Speaker 4: uh and well hydrated and relaxed, you know that the
Speaker 4: chance of getting a vein and a person like that
Speaker 4: is quite high. You know, uh in someone who's who's
Speaker 4: dehydrated terriff I had been sick, had been in prison
Speaker 4: for two decades. You know, it becomes a lot harder.
Speaker 4: Plus you're also giving it over to people who are
Speaker 4: not expert. Okay, you know, an antiseesiologist in good standing
Speaker 4: is not going to spend their wednesdays over at the
Speaker 4: you know, State corrections Sticking ivs in people for execution,
Speaker 4: it's not something that we do and people who you know,
Speaker 4: to learn to do in intervenous is a technical skill.
Speaker 4: It can be learned, but I think also the people
Speaker 4: who are doing it themselves are nervous.
Speaker 5: Alabama won't reveal exactly who is on the execution team,
Speaker 5: what their training is, how much experience they have, but
Speaker 5: it's safe to say this isn't a team full of doctors,
Speaker 5: since doctors have to take an oath to do no harm,
Speaker 5: and hooking someone up to an IV that will transport
Speaker 5: lethal drugs is definitely doing harm. That's as if it's point,
Speaker 5: these are prison employees side contractors. It's not the anesthesiologist
Speaker 5: from the nearest teaching hospital.
Speaker 4: You know, there are some ways of making it more
Speaker 4: likely than not to succeed. But you know what is
Speaker 4: taught either in nursing school or as an emt or
Speaker 4: as a doctor cannot be lifted into the death chamber
Speaker 4: like it's not the same place. If these people are
Speaker 4: not patients, you know, they're not collaborators to you.
Speaker 5: In some states with the death penalty, putting in the
Speaker 5: IVY is done in full view of the witnesses to
Speaker 5: the execution, but in Alabama it's done before the witnesses
Speaker 5: are invited into the execution chamber, which means that any
Speaker 5: outsider who is there to see the execution, the families
Speaker 5: and friends and reporters, are forced to guess how the
Speaker 5: IVY process is going. The executioners are supposed to start
Speaker 5: at six the witnesses are all sequestered in a holding
Speaker 5: room away from the execution side, and if it gets
Speaker 5: to be seven pm or seven thirty or nine pm
Speaker 5: and the witnesses haven't yet been picked up by the
Speaker 5: bus to go take them to the execution chamber, then
Speaker 5: everyone starts to wonder is there a problem. This is
Speaker 5: exactly what happened in the summer of twenty twenty two
Speaker 5: while Kenny Smith was still appealing his sentence, a condemned
Speaker 5: inmate at home and named Joe Nathan James was set
Speaker 5: to be executed. Everything with James ran late afterwards. The
Speaker 5: state insisted the procedure had gone according to plan, but
Speaker 5: Zivid was suspicious. He asked to perform a second autopsy,
Speaker 5: and what he found was, in a word, gruesome, Consider
Speaker 5: yourself warned.
Speaker 4: I was able to get his body, and I worked
Speaker 4: with a pathologist in Alabama and went there and with him,
Speaker 4: you know, we've performed this second autopsy, and I saw
Speaker 4: in his body evidence of, you know, multiple attempts at
Speaker 4: intravenouses and some of these things, you know, you could
Speaker 4: see bruising, which meant that they were you know, kind
Speaker 4: of getting in and getting out of a van. And
Speaker 4: there was some bleeding under the skin, and there was
Speaker 4: these were both on you know, on multiple spots on
Speaker 4: his arms, up and down, both arms. And then there
Speaker 4: was also evidence of something called a cutdown. And a
Speaker 4: cutdown is where you take a knife to the skin
Speaker 4: and you open the skin to reveal, you know, a
Speaker 4: vein beneath that that you couldn't otherwise see or feel.
Speaker 4: It's kind of an old style technique and it's been
Speaker 4: replaced by ultrasound, and the protocol at the time does
Speaker 4: not provide for the possibility of a cutdown. And also
Speaker 4: the cut down along the edges of it had blood,
Speaker 4: which again meant that he had to have been alive
Speaker 4: and bleeding for this to have taken place. So somehow
Speaker 4: they got some ivy in him, but it took them
Speaker 4: hours to do it. So picture you know, Joe, Nathan
Speaker 4: James lying there, strapped down, you know, not cooperative as
Speaker 4: they poke and poke and poke him and finally just
Speaker 4: take a knife to his forearm to open up his
Speaker 4: forearm to try to get a vein there and that
Speaker 4: so that was Joe.
Speaker 5: Then came Alan Miller two months later. Under Alabama law,
Speaker 5: once a defendant has been convicted of a capital crime,
Speaker 5: he or she is given a death warrant. A warrant
Speaker 5: is a writ issued by the court which lays out
Speaker 5: the facts of the conviction, the specific offense, the judgment
Speaker 5: of the court, and the time and place of execution,
Speaker 5: which in Alabama is a purpose built facility on the
Speaker 5: campus of Home and Prison in Atmore at the time,
Speaker 5: once a date had been set, the execution had to
Speaker 5: take place by midnight, so they start at six pm
Speaker 5: and give themselves six hours with Alan Miller. They ran
Speaker 5: at a time, gave up, the state had to come
Speaker 5: back and kill him on another day. Then came Kenny Smith.
Speaker 5: Tell me your impressions of Kenny.
Speaker 2: What was he like?
Speaker 6: Kenny? I obviously didn't know him when he was a
Speaker 6: twenty two year old person at the time of the
Speaker 6: events for which he was convicted. But he truly was
Speaker 6: an example. And I know this is going to sound
Speaker 6: right and a cliche, but he really got religion figuratively
Speaker 6: and literally. You know, in prison he was a force
Speaker 6: for good.
Speaker 5: This is Robert Grass, one of Kenny Smith's lawyers, the
Speaker 5: one who had been with him the longest. He's a
Speaker 5: litigator for a prestigious corporate law firm in New York City.
Speaker 5: He represents pharmaceutical companies, but he does pro bono death
Speaker 5: penalty work on the side. He started representing Kenny Smith
Speaker 5: in two thousand and five. How many times over the
Speaker 5: course of twenty years did you go to Alabama?
Speaker 6: I don't have an exact number, but.
Speaker 4: Many.
Speaker 5: Home in prison where Smith was held is in the
Speaker 5: southern part of the state. Grass was in New York,
Speaker 5: so that's New York to Atlanta, Atlanta to Mobile, ran
Speaker 5: a car in mobile drive an hour to add more,
Speaker 5: he made that journey for close to two decades.
Speaker 6: I really felt as if we developed a friendship, I
Speaker 6: really would have liked to have had the opportunity to
Speaker 6: interact with them under different circumstances.
Speaker 5: Grass is older, lean, dark suit, gray hair, ivy, lead
Speaker 5: degree cum laude, law school graduate. He probably builds out
Speaker 5: at some astronomical number. Whenever I read about some complicated
Speaker 5: legal negotiation that goes on into the wee hours of
Speaker 5: the morning, I imagine it's because someone like Robert Grass
Speaker 5: is involved as measured and dispassionate and implacable at three
Speaker 5: AM as they were at three in the afternoon. You
Speaker 5: have to listen very closely when he talks. He doesn't
Speaker 5: broadcast his feelings. He sends out morse code signals. Talk
Speaker 5: a little bit more about your friendship. It's an unlikely friendship.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, we obviously grew up in.
Speaker 5: Different circumstances, different circumstances, morse code.
Speaker 6: I've had other experiences with some folks on death Throw
Speaker 6: where I, you know, didn't feel the same bond. But Kenny,
Speaker 6: as I said by the time I knew him, was
Speaker 6: just a decent man, incredibly gracious, and really seemed to
Speaker 6: have the best he could given the environment he was
Speaker 6: in to have been leading a productive life in that environment.
Speaker 5: In the fall of twenty twenty two, Smith and his
Speaker 5: legal team suffered a serious setback. Smith was finally given
Speaker 5: a death warrant, and the warrant set the date of
Speaker 5: the execution November seventeenth, twenty twenty two. But those two
Speaker 5: botched execution cases, Alan Miller and Joe Nathan James, gave
Speaker 5: Grass one more chance. The Supreme Court has long supported
Speaker 5: the idea the states can execute prisoners if they wish,
Speaker 5: but they have insisted that executions have to be done
Speaker 5: the right way, and what happened to Joe Nathan James
Speaker 5: and to Alan Miller didn't seem like it fit any
Speaker 5: definition of the right way. So Smith's lawyers sued, the
Speaker 5: way Alabama is practicing lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment.
Speaker 5: The case was dismissed. Grass appealed to the Eleventh Circuit
Speaker 5: in Atlanta. Arguments were heard on November sixteenth, the day
Speaker 5: before Smith's death warrant. Grass went directly from the hearing
Speaker 5: to the prison.
Speaker 6: Then I went to at Moore, which is where Holman
Speaker 6: is visited with Kenny. That morning, we were still waiting
Speaker 6: for the Eleventh Circuit's decision, and that day became a
Speaker 6: real rollercoaster of emotions.
Speaker 5: Grass was in a hotel room a mile or two
Speaker 5: from the prison. At eight pm, Grass heard that the
Speaker 5: prison guards at home and had taken Kenny out of
Speaker 5: his cell and were preparing him for execution. But that
Speaker 5: wasn't right. His appeal was still up in the air.
Speaker 5: Then Grass got another call. The Eleventh Circuit had ruled
Speaker 5: in Kenny's favor. The execution was off, at which point
Speaker 5: the State of Alabama appealed to the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: It was now after eight.
Speaker 6: PM, and in the meantime, I'm kind of watching the
Speaker 6: clock tick because the death warn't expired at midnight, so
Speaker 6: I'm hoping to reach that point without this going forward.
Speaker 6: But at about a quarter after ten or so, got
Speaker 6: a call from the emergency clerk at the United States
Speaker 6: Supreme Court, sometimes referred to as the death Clerk because
Speaker 6: a lot of the emergency involve capital cases. But who said,
Speaker 6: there's no easy way to say this, and so I
Speaker 6: knew from that preferatory remark what was coming.
Speaker 5: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Alabama. One of
Speaker 5: the reporters, who was at home in prison covering the story,
Speaker 5: emailed Grass to say they were moving the witnesses to
Speaker 5: the death chamber. Grass sat in his hotel room waiting
Speaker 5: to hear what happened. Nothing, silence. The next morning he
Speaker 5: learned why.
Speaker 6: So he was taken out of his cell, thinking that
Speaker 6: his execution was imminent, strapped to a gurney, and nothing
Speaker 6: is happening. And he's asking, you know, the corrections officers
Speaker 6: who are with them, what's going on, and they, you know,
Speaker 6: tell him they don't know. And then when they finally
Speaker 6: got going, you know, they've got three members of an
Speaker 6: IV team, none of whom are identified to him. There
Speaker 6: are other people in the execution chamber with him that
Speaker 6: were not identified to him. They're you know, jabbing him
Speaker 6: with a needle trying to find a vein, which they
Speaker 6: weren't able to do. Then they tried something called a
Speaker 6: central line procedure to kind of stick a needle under
Speaker 6: his collarbone and reach one of his central veins. But
Speaker 6: again they didn't tell him what they were doing. What
Speaker 6: was going on. They just kind of put a surgical
Speaker 6: gown over him. You know, one of the IV team
Speaker 6: members came back into the room in surgical garb, and
Speaker 6: you know, Kenny is asking these people what's what they're doing.
Speaker 6: No one is telling them.
Speaker 5: I'm going to read from a report on that evening,
Speaker 5: commissioned by Grass and his team. It includes a very
Speaker 5: detailed description of what Kenny said happened to him in
Speaker 5: the execution chamber. He recalled seeing a clear plastic sheet
Speaker 5: over his chest with an open center. He saw that
Speaker 5: the man had a stringe in his hand, and he
Speaker 5: unbuttoned mister Smith's shirt and injected a yellow liquid into
Speaker 5: his chest. The man said, you will feel something cool,
Speaker 5: and the man slid a long needle into his chest.
Speaker 5: He inserted the needle and as Kenny perceived it, moved
Speaker 5: the needle around while it was inserted in his chest.
Speaker 5: Mister Smith noted that he quote lost all composure at
Speaker 5: this point, describing everything became surreal, Everything went out the window.
Speaker 5: Mister Smith became terrified that he was being injected with
Speaker 5: a substance that would render him unable to communicate some
Speaker 5: that he knew would violate an existing court order. He
Speaker 5: was again panicked that he would not be able to
Speaker 5: say his final words to his family and the victim's family,
Speaker 5: given what he heard had happened in a previous execution.
Speaker 5: The man who had been injecting him in the chest
Speaker 5: and the IVY team all stepped back. Mister Smith tried
Speaker 5: to gather himself and then said that they stepped back
Speaker 5: up and the man from behind his shoulder had a
Speaker 5: large gage needle with a large cylinder. Mister Smith said
Speaker 5: he quote freaked out, quote demanding that someone call his lawyer. Next,
Speaker 5: Deputy Warden Woods put his hands on mister Smith on
Speaker 5: both sides of his head and said, quote this is
Speaker 5: for your own good, pulling his head to the side.
Speaker 5: Mister Smith then recalled searing pain as he was injected
Speaker 5: under his collarbone. He said it took my breath away,
Speaker 5: and he recalled that he was gasping and trying to
Speaker 5: get away by bucking up off the table. Mister Smith
Speaker 5: recounted that he believed the man tried approximately five times
Speaker 5: to get this large needle into a vein under his collarbone.
Speaker 6: By the time this was done, that after three and
Speaker 6: a half or four hours being strapped to a gurney.
Speaker 6: You know, he was unable to stand, walk, unbutton his shirt,
Speaker 6: you know, change his clothes, do any of that without assistance.
Speaker 5: It was now almost midnight. Ken, he couldn't stand. He
Speaker 5: asked for a wheelchair, they refused. He sat outside the
Speaker 5: chamber until the guards picked him up by the arms
Speaker 5: and carried him to the infirmary. I can't help but
Speaker 5: think about the execution team in this moment, assuming they'd
Speaker 5: be able to carry out the most overwhelming of tasks
Speaker 5: on the pretense that it's a clean, professional, humane exercise,
Speaker 5: only to suddenly realize they can't do it. They're over
Speaker 5: their heads, and they can't hide. They're stuck in the
Speaker 5: execution chamber until midnight for reasons I can't fully explain.
Speaker 5: Every time I think of the night of November seventeenth,
Speaker 5: I think of the lines from an old Graham Parker song.
Speaker 5: The doctor gets nervous completing the service. He's all rubber
Speaker 5: gloves and no head. He fumbles the light switch. It's
Speaker 5: just another minor hitch. Wishes to God he was dead.
Speaker 5: After a night like that, how could you not wish
Speaker 5: to God you were dead. Kenny's miss failed execution was
Speaker 5: on a Thursday. The following Monday, the Governor of Alabama, Kivy,
Speaker 5: paused all pending executions in the state and ordered a
Speaker 5: top to bottom review of the state's capital punishment protocol.
Speaker 5: And then two and a half weeks after that came
Speaker 5: Steve Marshall's press conference.
Speaker 3: Good after me, everybody call this press conference today because.
Speaker 5: Attorney General's Office Montgomery, Alabama flags on both sides of
Speaker 5: the podium, Alabama's highest ranking legal officer. Seeks to set
Speaker 5: the record straight. And what was on his mind that
Speaker 5: six hour window that home and Prison had given itself
Speaker 5: to get someone ready to be executed. Why were they
Speaker 5: starting so late in today? It was letting murderers and
Speaker 5: their lawyers gain the system.
Speaker 3: So if you're a defense lawyer representing an inmate, you
Speaker 3: simply know that you have to push the clock back
Speaker 3: as far as possible. I think we saw that occur
Speaker 3: with the last two executions.
Speaker 5: No form not to mention the prisoners themselves, they weren't
Speaker 5: helping matters.
Speaker 3: But let's also acknowledge that inmates themselves have responsibility here,
Speaker 3: not just in the delay that's occurred. But I think
Speaker 3: you've seen impletings that we have where inmates are resisting
Speaker 3: the efforts to put that IVY line in, which obviously
Speaker 3: makes it more difficult.
Speaker 5: Can you believe it the condemned prisoners are not cooperating
Speaker 5: with their executioners. A reporter raises his hand. Is there
Speaker 5: anything the state legislature could do, like maybe adding another
Speaker 5: method of execution or increasing that window to forty eight
Speaker 5: or seventy two hours? Yes, yes, Marshall says, that is
Speaker 5: the issue here. We just don't have long.
Speaker 3: Enough now, although we have a twenty four hour period
Speaker 3: right now, but really an actuality have a six hour
Speaker 3: window based upon policies and department corrections having in place
Speaker 3: long before the current commissioner, long before Governor Iby or myself.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure that's one of the things that they
Speaker 3: will look at as part of their review.
Speaker 5: I'm sure that's one of the things they will look
Speaker 5: at as part of their review. And sure enough it was.
Speaker 5: The Governor's top to bottom review turned out to be
Speaker 5: a new rule that said the guards at home in
Speaker 5: prison would have until the following morning to complete their service,
Speaker 5: six more hours to poke and prod and take a
Speaker 5: knife and peel back flesh and dig around the collarbone,
Speaker 5: and manage the rising sense of shame and self loathing
Speaker 5: and revulsion that comes to being asked to do a
Speaker 5: job without really knowing how to do a job.
Speaker 3: It's been a great deal of media coverage, both local
Speaker 3: and national, about what happened in Kenney Smith's execution chamber.
Speaker 3: Much of that coverage has seemingly been openly sympathetic to
Speaker 3: Smith and his cause, even with some going so far
Speaker 3: as to advocate for the abolishment of the death penalty.
Speaker 3: And on what basis exactly because a cold blooded, convicted
Speaker 3: killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small
Speaker 3: ivy line really potting and poking with a needle.
Speaker 5: As the moral failure cascade gains momentum, indifference turns to cruelty.
Speaker 5: And through all of this, Kenny Smith was back in
Speaker 5: his cell, still alive. What do you do after the
Speaker 5: state has tried to kill you and failed? If the
Speaker 5: state botches the attempt the first time around, does that
Speaker 5: disqualify them from trying again? Robert Grass and the rest
Speaker 5: of Kenny Smith's legal team realized they needed someone to
Speaker 5: do an assessment of Kenny's condition before they could do
Speaker 5: anything else. They needed someone who knew what it might
Speaker 5: be like to be strapped to a gurney for three
Speaker 5: and a half hours while a group of people in
Speaker 5: surgical garb stabbed them with needles. So they called Kate
Speaker 5: Porterfield coming up on Revisionist History.
Speaker 1: One of the people on the team, who he didn't know,
Speaker 1: says to him, it's over and I'll be praying for you.
Speaker 1: So these kinds of moments for Kenny were just unmanageable. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: they were unmanageable moments with other humans.
Speaker 2: I guess it started after Kenny was born. What I
Speaker 2: think is he was doing stuff and A was thinking
Speaker 2: I was, you know, right, and he was jealous. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I wasn't you know, I had a kidom rise.
Speaker 1: He really kind of got me. He made me really
Speaker 1: pause and think a lot, Kenny Smith, because watching someone
Speaker 1: only start from a place of love after something so
Speaker 1: horrible was I've never seen that before.
Speaker 5: Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben the Daph Haffrey,
Speaker 5: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Benda Daph Haffrey
Speaker 5: and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Schakerji. Fact checking
Speaker 5: by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, engineering
Speaker 5: by Nina Bird Lawrence, production support from Luke Clemond, original
Speaker 5: scoring by Luis Kerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd.
Speaker 5: Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Glabo.
Speaker 5: You can get this entire season now add free by
Speaker 5: subscribing to Revision's history on Pushkin Plus, sign up on
Speaker 5: the show page on Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin slash Plus.
Speaker 5: Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks,
Speaker 5: exclusive binges, and bonus content for all pushkin shows