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Alabama executes Willie B. Smith

The state of Alabama Thursday executed Willie B. Smith III for the 1991 robbery and murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson. 

Smith was pronounced dead at 9:47 p.m., according to the Associated Press. He had no last words. 

Smith's attorneys sought a stay of the death sentence, arguing that the state failed to give him a proper way to choose death by nitrogen hypoxia in June 2018. They said that Smith, who had intellectual disabilities, was unable to understand an opt-in form, and that the state violated his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in not accommodating him.  

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Smith's final appeal on Thursday, hours after a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also denied his request for a stay. The justices in the majority did not issue an opinion.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing separately, criticized the state for the "haphazard" approach used to notify death row inmates of the choices. Death row inmates who spoke to the Advertiser in 2019 described a chaotic process for choosing death by nitrogen hypoxia, saying they were only informed of the choice shortly before deadline. That led to a scramble to contact attorneys about what the choice meant. 


"Once a State has determined that individuals on death row should have a choice as to how the State will execute them, it should ensure that a meaningful choice is provided," Sotomayor wrote.

Smith ate snacks on Thursday but refused meals, according to Linda Mays, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Corrections. He met with an attorney and a spiritual adviser. 

A jury convicted Smith of Johnson's murder in 1992. According to court records, Smith and a companion forced Johnson into a trunk, then had her recite her ATM number to take money from her account. Smith shot Johnson in the trunk of the car, then burned the vehicle in an attempt to destroy evidence.

Shelley Luna, a friend of Johnson's, described her as "the most humble person, very soft-spoken, very kind."

“She just oozed sweetness," she said. "Anybody that crossed her path would say that. … She was the easiest person in the world to be friends with and to talk to. It just makes her murder that much harder. You always wonder why do bad things happen to good people?”

The courts have known of Smith's intellectual disabilities since his first trial. Jefferson County Circuit Judge James Hard wrote in a 1992 sentencing memo that Smith had a “luckless upbringing scarred by an abusive father,” and noted Smith had an IQ of 75 at the time of the trial, writing that Smith was “in borderline range between mild retardation and low average intelligence,” he wrote. But Hard concurred with the jury's recommendation of a death sentence. 

The U.S. Supreme Court banned executions of those with intellectual disabilities in 2002. Smith's attempts to have his death sentence overturned on those grounds have not succeeded. In 2009, Jefferson County Circuit Judge J. William Cole ruled that Smith had not shown "many, if any, actual examples of how his low IQ affected his adaptive functioning in everyday life before or after the incident in question."

Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said that Smith was at least the 28th intellectually disabled person to be executed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such executions unconstitutional. 

"The fact that the courts are willfully blind to the illegality of carrying out executions and are willing to impose procedural barriers to enforcing constitutional rights undermines the legitimacy of capital punishment in the United States,” Dunham said.

In 2018, Alabama enacted a law making death by nitrogen hypoxia an alternate method of execution. The process has never been used in an execution. The law gave death row inmates a limited window to choose that method of death over lethal injection. 

Smith's attorneys argued that he was unable to understand the choice put before him; that DOC knew of his cognitive impairments, and that under the ADA, the Alabama Department of Corrections should have provided accommodations to allow him to grasp what the choice was.

"In Mr. Smith’s case, intake records clearly noted Mr. Smith did not understand what was going on, though it was explained to him, and prison officials had constructive knowledge of his IQ scores of 64 and 72," Smith's attorneys wrote in their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The Alabama Attorney General's office said DOC followed the law as written, and that Smith had not produced evidence that he would have chosen that method of execution. 

"Though Smith was provided an election form and ready access to counsel, he did not elect," the office wrote in a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday. "And over the course of nearly two years of litigation, he never alleged or produced evidence before the district court that he would have elected during the statutory timeframe if he had been given a reasonable accommodation (which he never asked for)."

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier on Thursday rejected Smith's attempt to stay the execution. U.S. Circuit Judge Charles Wilson wrote that there was nothing in the record to suggest U.S. District Judge Emily Marks erred when allowing his execution to proceed.


"Mr. Smith has not shown that any of these factual findings rise to the level of being clearly erroneous," Wilson wrote. "Nor does the record indicate that the district court followed improper procedures or applied the incorrect legal standards to its factual findings." 

In a concurrence, U.S. Circuit Judge Jill Pryor wrote that she was "bound by law" to uphold the lower court. But Pryor added that she was "confounded" by DOC's "insistence that Mr. Smith be put to death immediately by lethal injection."

"ADOC ostensibly intended to inform Mr. Smith of his right to choose death by nitrogen hypoxia," she wrote. "Mr. Smith intended to exercise that right, but because of his disability, he was unable to do so. ADOC has acknowledged that it could, if ordered to do it, give Mr. Smith another chance to make the election. Under these circumstances, I cannot silently acquiesce in the State’s refusal to afford Mr. Smith this final dignity."

The state scheduled the execution for Smith in February, but the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the execution over questions about Smith's spiritual adviser being banned from the chamber. The state and Smith's attorneys reached an agreement on the issue over the summer. Smith's adviser, Pastor Robert Wiley was present for the execution on Thursday. 

Smith was the 1st inmate executed in Alabama in 2021, and the 68th to be executed by the state since 1983.  

Smith becomes the 8th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,537th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977. 

Sources: Montgomery Advertiser, Staff; Rick Halperin, Staff, October 22, 2021

Alabama man put to death for 1991 killing of woman


Alabama's death chamber
ATMORE, Ala. -- An Alabama man who avoided execution in February was put to death Thursday for the 1991 killing of a woman who was abducted during a robbery and then shot in a cemetery.

Willie B. Smith III, 52, received a lethal injection at a prison in southwest Alabama. He was pronounced dead at 9:47 p.m. local time.

The execution went forward after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay by his lawyers, who had argued the execution should be blocked on grounds that Smith had an intellectual disability meriting further scrutiny by the courts.

Smith was convicted of kidnapping and murdering 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham.

Prosecutors said Smith had a shotgun when he abducted Johnson in October 1991 from an ATM location in the Birmingham area. He withdrew money using her bank card and then took her to a cemetery and shot her in the back of the head, they said. Johnson was the sister of a Birmingham police officer.

“After waiting for 30 years, justice has been served,” Johnson's family said in a statement read by Alabama Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn.

The execution began shortly after 9:30 p.m. Smith declined to give any final words. The state allowed a personal pastor with the inmate for the first time during the execution. Pastor Robert Wiley appeared to pray with Smith and put his hand on his leg as the lethal injection procedure began. One of his attorneys held his fist up to the witness room glass in an apparent sign of support.

The court had halted an earlier execution date for Smith in February when he was already in a holding cell near the death chamber and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with his appeal that he could not be put to death without his pastor present.

Smith appeared to quickly jerk twice upward on the gurney as the first drugs hit his system. “That's the midazolam,” one of his attorneys said in reference to the sedative, used at the start of executions, that has been the subject of litigation. His breathing was initially labored, but then slowed and stopped.

Members of Johnson's family watched the execution in a separate room from Smith's attorneys and the media.

Dunn said the execution went “according to our protocol.”

“Sharma Ruth Johnson was abducted at gunpoint, threatened while in the trunk of the car, terrorized, assaulted, and ultimately, Willie B. Smith, III brutally killed her,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement issued after the execution.

“The evidence in this case was overwhelming, and justice has been rightfully served,” she added.

Recently, Smith's lawyers had argued unsuccessfully that the inmate had an intellectual disability that prevented him from understanding the prison paperwork related to the selection of an execution method.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled people is unconstitutional, but courts have ruled that Smith was eligible for the death penalty.

Experts had estimated Smith’s IQ from 64 on the low end and 75 on the high end, but courts have ruled he was eligible for the death penalty. An expert in a post-trial appeal said while Smith’s IQ was measured at 64, his language, reading, and mathematics skills, and that these particular results were inconsistent with a diagnosis of intellectual disability.

Last-minute court filings had centered on whether Smith should have been given assistance under the Americans With Disabilities Act to understand the form distributed to death row inmates in 2018 regarding selection of an execution method. After adopting nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, state law gave inmates a 30-day window to request that as their preferred execution method.

If Smith had requested nitrogen hypoxia, his death sentence could not have been carried out to date because the state has not yet developed a system for using nitrogen to execute inmates.

Smith's attorneys had unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to stay the execution until a trial could be held in his ongoing lawsuit arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act required him to have assistance in understanding the form.

The state of Alabama argued that Smith had received access to his lawyers for help.

While the Supreme Court let the execution go forward, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Alabama's haphazard approach but noted that she was “respecting the denial of the stay.”

“Alabama does not dispute that Willie Smith has significantly below-average intellectual functioning. Although the State debates his precise reading level and IQ, those disputes do not resolve the fundamental inequity: the State’s compressed timeline for notifying eligible inmates and haphazard approach to doing so,” Sotomayor wrote.

Alabama's Department of Corrections changed some procedures in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The prison system limited media witnesses to the execution to one journalist, a representative from The Associated Press, instead of the five previously allowed.

Source: The Associated Press, Staff, October 22, 2021


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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