Atmore, Alabama A Alabama inmate was given a reprieve on Thursday for a scheduled lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state should allow its personal pastor into the death chamber.
The lethal injection of Willie B. Smith III was ordered by Alabama after judges upheld an order told by the Eleventh U.S. Court of Appeals that he could not be executed without his pastor in the chamber. Corrections Department spokeswoman Samantha Rose said the execution would not proceed, given the verdict. Alabama maintained that non-prison staff may not be in the room for security reasons.
“Willie Smith is sentenced to death, and his last wish is to have his pastor with him while he dies,” Judge Elena Kagan wrote in a similar opinion with three other judges.
Department of Corrections in Alabama via AP
“Alabama has not had the burden of showing that the exclusion of all clergymen from the execution room is necessary to secure the prison. So the state cannot execute Smith without its pastor, to facilitate Smith ‘ “Call the worlds of the living and the dead,” Kagan wrote, “Judge Amy Coney Barrett joined three liberal judges in enforcing the ruling.
The case was the latest in a series of legal battles over personal spiritual advisers at executions. In 2019, the court stopped the execution of a prisoner in Texas who claimed that his religious freedom would be violated if his Buddhist spiritual adviser could not be with him in the death chamber.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh suggested in a dispute that states seeking to avoid litigation on the issue should find a way to allow spiritual counselors into the execution room, as other states and the federal government have done.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall did not immediately comment on the decision to cancel the lethal injection.
After the execution was canceled, Smith was taken back from the detention cell to his cell on the death row by the execution room, a spokesman for the prison said.
Smith, 51, is expected to receive a lethal injection in a southern Alabama prison for the murder of 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham in 1991.
Smith tried to allow his spiritual adviser, Pastor Robert Wiley, into the execution room, something the state does not allow.
“Mr. Smith has promised that he believes the point of transition between life and death is important, and that his spiritual counselor is physically present at that moment, an integral part of his faith,” Smith’s attorneys said in a statement. court documents written.
In the past, Alabama has regularly put a state-run Christian prison chaplain in the execution room to pray with a prisoner if asked. The state stopped the practice after a Muslim prisoner asked to have an imam present. The prison system, which did not have Muslim clerical staff, said non-prison staff may not be allowed in the room.
Prosecutors say Smith abducted Johnson with weapons from an ATM, stole her $ 80 and then took her to a cemetery where he shot her in the back of the head. The victim was the sister of a police detective.
“More than twenty-nine years ago, Smith shot dead a woman whose only crime was stopping the use of the ATM,” the legal attorneys wrote in court documents to allow the lethal injection to continue.
Justices evacuated another residence issued by the 11th Circuit related to Smith’s intellectual ability. His lawyers argued that the state is failing to help the man, who has an IQ of less than 75, with the forms that affect the timing of his execution. The Alabama Attorney General’s office in the court reports disputed that Smith was disabled and called it a last-minute delay.
If the execution had progressed, it would have been the first by a state in 2021 and one of the few at state level since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, no state has been executed since July 8.
After a 17-year hiatus over federal executions, President Trump resumed it in July. By December, the US government executed more people within the year than all the states still executing. The U.S. killed 13 people before President Biden took office, including three this year.