Alabama Governor, Kay Ivey, has sought a pause in executions and ordered a “top-to-bottom” review of the state’s capital punishment system. Have the good Christians in the Heart of Dixie come to their senses and realized that the death penalty is inconsistent with their “pro-life” philosophy? No. Ivey wants the pause because Albama cannot figure out how to kill people.
Last Thursday, the state tried to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith, 57, for the murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife in 1988. They failed. As the AP reported,
Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said prison staff tried for about an hour to get the two required intravenous lines connected to Smith, 57. Hamm said they established one line but were unsuccessful with a second line, which is required under the state’s protocol as a backup, after trying several locations on Smith’s body.
Officials then tried a central line, which involves a catheter placed into a large vein. “We were not able to have time to complete that, so we called off the execution,” Hamm said.
In their failure, the Alabama authorities, like all true conservatives, blame-shifted. In this case, they pointed fingers at the clock. The Supreme Court had removed the last barrier to Smith’s execution at 10:20 pm. The execution warrant ran out at midnight. So they had “only” 100 minutes to flip the switch.
Not that they had to start from scratch. Smith was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber (by some reports, for four hours). All the state-sanctioned killers had to do was get the IV lines in, and they were off to the races. They could not get it done.
By itself, this would be an indictment of the system. However, it was the second failed execution in a row. Two months earlier, in September, the state called off the execution of Alan Miller, 57, after they poked him with needles for over an hour trying to find a vein. Miller claimed that, at one point, they left him hanging vertically on a gurney.
There is more. In 2018, the state called off a third execution when the authorities could not establish an IV line in Doyle Lee Hamm — who later died in jail of natural causes.
Alabama is not alone in its sadistic incompetence. Last Wednesday in the Eyman prison, Arizona, Murray Hooper, convicted of a 1980 double murder, lay strapped to a gurney, awaiting lethal injection. Officials failed multiple times to place an IV to deliver the execution drugs. Finally, they jammed a catheter in the femoral artery near his groin. In this case, the multiple failures did not prevent the state from killing the condemned. And Hooper is no more.
On the same day as Hooper drew his last, Texas authorities were equally indefatigable in killing Stephen Barbee, 55, who the system had convicted in February 2005 of the murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend and her young son. They also needed an hour and a half to find a vein to deliver the lethal injection drugs.
The next day, Oklahoma dispatched Richard Fairchild, 63, for murdering his girlfriend’s three-year-old son in 1993. In this case, there were no reports of delays while officials poked around for access to his veins. Here the barbarity was that Fairchild should not have been on death row in the first place.
Fairchild’s attorneys said he grew up in an abusive home, suffered from alcohol and substance abuse at a young age, and developed head trauma as a teen boxer, all of which may have impaired his moral judgment later on. Despite these warning signs, his original attorneys never raised them before the court, even though the Supreme Court has found such factors could rule out a death sentence.
This brings us back to Arizona and the Murray Hooper killing. He is another man who rode racism, bias, dubious evidence, forced confessions, and police brutality into the death house. His story is convoluted, so please bear with me.
Originally from Chicago, Hooper was eventually arrested for a triple murder in Illinois. I write “eventually’” because he was not a target of Illinois officials until after Arizona authorities had named him a suspect in a double murder in Phoenix.
The official timeline was that Hooper had committed the triple-murder in Chicago. He then traveled to Arizona, where he committed the double murder. He then returned to Illinois. In Illinois, the officials used his possible involvement in the Arizona murders as grounds to arrest him for the Chicago killings. He then suffered the brutality Chicago cops used on Black suspects. He was convicted and sentenced to death. But the death penalty was thrown out by an appeals court based on prosecutorial misconduct. However, it was too late for Hooper in Arizona.
The Arizona authorities had used his Illinois conviction as motivation to rig the evidence against Hooper in the Phoenix murder of William “Pat” Redmond. The case against Hooper essentially rested on the eyewitness testimony of the victim's wife, Marilyn Redmond. The police said she picked Hooper out of a lineup, but they provided no video of the identification. And Redmond had earlier stated she would not be able to recognize her husband's killers, one of whom she identified at one time as Black and, at another, as white.
This piece in the Independent newspaper, “Racism, gruesome errors, and botched executions: Inside America’s four-person, 48-hour execution spree” outlines the details of the total prosecutorial depravity in the Hooper case.
Death penalty proponents can find cases of depraved murder, both so vile and so open-and-shut that even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal will feel a visceral desire to pull the switch. But that is not a sufficient argument to support a process that has sent some innocent people to their deaths. And for so many other dead, whose lives were so full of extenuating circumstances, a prison term was the better solution.
Besides, what is so “soft” about a life sentence in a small concrete box without the possibility of parole?