Back on the morning of Jan. 26, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the state’s prison officials for a “textbook” nitrogen gas execution.
“The [Alabama Department of Corrections] deserve a great deal of thanks and credit for being willing to be the one to step up, first in the country to do so,” Marshall said, adding that he suspected “many states will follow.”
This is what happened. Kenneth Eugene Smith convulsed for two minutes and gasped for at least seven more as he choked to death.
And the response of the men and women in charge of the criminal justice system was: No he didn’t.
U.S. District Judge J. Austin Huffaker rejected a challenge to nitrogen executions from Carey Dale Grayson on Nov. 6. The judge said that Grayson, facing his own death by gas, would only suffer “psychological” damage. He claimed that there were “conflicting” accounts of Smith’s agonies in the chamber.
I have seen executions. They are horrible. A botched execution is even worse.
But what I saw was nothing compared to what our reporter and the other journalists in the witness chamber at Atmore saw on Jan. 25. A human being struggled for life for 10 minutes under an allegedly humane execution method.
Their stories all come to one point: the state tortured Smith to death.
It happened again on Sept. 26, when Alabama executed Alan Eugene Miller. It happened again on Nov. 21 when Grayson was suffocated.
In the name of the people of Alabama.
In your name.
If there are “conflicting” accounts of what happened, it’s because state officials like Marshall want us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.
The federal judiciary has done that. They have long insisted that capital punishment isn’t the unjust and compromised system that it is, but a sacred act that must never face restraint from bleeding-heart annoyances like the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Now judges simply refuse to engage with what’s happening in Alabama’s death chamber.
And without any limits, the state will continue torturing people to death, in your name.
This is irrational. Purposefully so.
Neither Alabama officials who cheer drawn-out executions nor the federal judges too gullible or too bloodthirsty to stop them can give a good reason to continue capital punishment.
The death penalty is not making us safer. Our violent crime rates are appalling by any measure, and far higher than similar states that don’t execute people.
And that’s before we get to the blatant racism; the terrible inequities in legal representation and the outright miscarriages of justice that power executions.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun noted this in 1994, when he wrote that after two decades of trying to find a fair method of applying capital punishment, he would “no longer tinker … with the machinery of death.”
“It seems that the decision whether a human being should live or die is so inherently subjective — rife with all of life’s understandings, experiences, prejudices, and passions — that it inevitably defies the rationality and consistency required by the Constitution,” the justice wrote.
But what Blackmun didn’t perceive, what he couldn’t perceive, is how his successors would get around these objections by jettisoning rationality.
When you insist that a task must be done because a task must be done — the politician’s fallacy — you can watch a human being struggle for air and thrash against restraints without once doubting your righteousness. You don’t have to worry about the Eighth Amendment when the nation’s high court says that any execution short of drawing and quartering is constitutional.
And so Alabama carried on all year, aided and abetted by a compliant judiciary that seems to have decided that the motivated distortions of reality by state officials weigh as much or more than witnesses trying in good faith to describe the suffocation of a human being.
So far, other states have not followed Alabama down this path, away from the facts of what nitrogen executions are. But our leaders will stay on the road.
Because Alabama’s death penalty can’t survive a reckoning with reality, reason, or morality.
“I don’t know who we think we are,” said Jodi Haley, whose mother Vicki Deblieux was killed by Grayson in 1994, shortly after Grayson’s execution last month. “To be in such a modern time, we regress when we implement this punishment. And I hope and pray that my mother’s death will invoke these changes and give her senseless death some purpose.”
I admire Haley’s generosity of spirit. In her shoes, I’m not sure I would have it. I want to believe that the brutality of Alabama’s death penalty will arouse opposition to it.
But we live in a state with judges and elected officials who will not grapple with what’s happening in the Atmore death chamber. They can’t let light break in. For executions to continue, the gurney must be shrouded in darkness.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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