Willie B. Smith III executed in Alabama (October 21, 2021)
FILE - This undated file
photo provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Willie B. Smith
III. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP, File)
You
killed a person and you are put in prison for life? The one you killed is not
in jail but he is dead." - Yoweri Museveni
On this date, October 21, 2021, Willie
B. Smith III was executed by lethal injection in Alabama. He was convicted of
kidnapping and murdering 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham in
October 1991.
Sharma Ruth Johnson, 22,
was slain in Birmingham on Oct. 27, 1991. Willie B. Smith III was convicted in
her slaying. Courtesy: Trussville TribuneCourtesy,
Trussville Tribune (MU
Alabama man
put to death for 1991 killing of woman
By KIM CHANDLERtoday
ATMORE,
Ala. (AP) — 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment