Tag: alabama

Minute by gruesome minute: From his last words to the final horrifying spasm on his gurney, how America’s first nitrogen gas execution saw killer Kenneth Smith thrash around while his wife wept during grisly 22-minute death in Alabama prison

A murderer was put to death in Alabama overnight with a previously unused and untested method, in what witnesses described as a horrifying 22-minute ordeal.

Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was paid $1,000 to kill an Alabama woman, 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett, more than 30 years ago and was sentenced to death for the crime. He has been on death row ever since.

The state had previously attempted to execute Smith in 2022, but the lethal injection was called off at the last minute because authorities couldn’t connect an IV line.

On Thursday night, the state tried again to put him to death, this time successfully using ‘nitrogen hypoxia’ – suffocation by administering gas through a mask.

It marked the first time a new execution method was used in the US since 1982, when lethal injection was introduced and later became the most common method. 

Alabama had predicted the nitrogen gas would cause unconsciousness within seconds and death within minutes.

However, those who watched the execution at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama have said it was anything but simple.

Witnesses said Smith appeared to shake and convulse at the start, pulled against his restraints, and breathed for up to ten minutes before finally falling unconscious.

While executions are never filmed in the US, it is possible to piece together the events from witnesses testimony given by those who watched the scene unfold in the immediate aftermath of Smith’s death.

Keep reading

Parole denied for 68-year-old in Alabama: ‘A life sentence for growing marijuana’

Leon Hotchkiss, now 68, remains behind bars in Alabama, spending decades imprisoned for growing pot.

Authorities seized about five and half pounds of the plant on his property in Baldwin County, allowing authorities to charge him under the state’s marijuana trafficking law.

In 2013, Hotchkiss was sentenced to spend the next 40 years in prison.

And when he came up for parole in February, after serving a decade, the three-member Alabama parole board voted to keep him there.

The board set his next hearing in 2028 – the furthest they could push it back. He’ll be 73.

Today, Hotchkiss is incarcerated at the Loxley Community Work Center, although he spends most days outside the lockup. Each morning, he is dropped off at his job at a Fairhope boat dealership.

Jody Cullifer recently retired from the dealership, but he’s the person who secured the job for Hotchkiss. He said he had trouble finding a person to wash the boats, so he called the prison and asked if they had anyone who could do the job and provide general maintenance. They sent Hotchkiss.

On Hotchkiss’s first day, Cullifer explained the job. “He picked up really quick… and did a phenomenal job,” he said.

Cullifer called Hotchkiss a good worker and a trustworthy employee, and said the bosses gave him his own key to the dealership. That way, Hotchkiss could let himself inside in case the prison van dropped him off too early in the morning.

Keep reading

‘Nothing short of grave robbery’: 2 families allege bodies of Alabama prison inmates were returned missing organs

Two families have claimed that when the Alabama Department of Corrections returned the bodies of their loved ones who died in prison, they were found to be missing one or more internal organs, court documents show.

When Charles Edward Singleton died at age 74, he was incarcerated at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center in Hamilton, about 90 miles northwest of Birmingham.

The chaplain of the prison told his family the corrections department would take care of funeral arrangements, according to an affidavit signed January 3 by Singleton’s daughter, Charlene Drake.

Drake said she told the chaplain the family wanted to make the arrangements and asked that the body be transported to a funeral home. But when Singleton’s body arrived, the funeral director informed her “it would be difficult to prepare his body for viewing, as his body was already in a noticeable state of decomposition” and his internal organs, including his brain, were missing, the affidavit said.

The funeral director said the organs are normally placed in a bag and put back in the body after an autopsy, but not in Singleton’s case, according to the affidavit.

The Alabama Department of Corrections told CNN it does not comment on pending litigation, nor does it authorize or perform autopsies.

“Once an inmate dies, the body is transported to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences or (the University of Alabama at Birmingham) for autopsy, depending on several factors, including but not limited to region and whether the death is unlawful, suspicious, or unnatural,” the department said in a statement.

Drake’s affidavit was filed in support of a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Brandon Clay Dotson, who was found dead at age 43 in Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton on November 16, 2023.

Keep reading

Alabama is sued by inmates who claim state made a staggering $450M by ‘convict leasing’ – and forcing them to work in fast food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King ‘for next to nothing’ in move ‘similar to cotton-picking’

A group of current and former prisoners are suing Alabama state alleging they made $450million by forcing them to work in fast food chains for ‘next to nothing’. 

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday at the Middle District Court, claims the prisoners were forced into a ‘modern-day form of slavery’ by the state. 

It says they were ‘entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money’ while the state kept the profits of their labor. 

The plaintiffs said they are regularly forced to work at McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, and Burger King franchises, Anheuser-Busch distributors, and meat processors. 

According to the complaint, inmates, ‘live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed, or raped… and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more.’

The lawsuit accuses government agencies – including the Alabama Department of Corrections – and over two dozen state officials, including Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall, of violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Alabama makes $450 million a year from forced labor, according to the complaint, which says since 2018, 575 private employers and over 100 public employers have ‘leased’ labor from Alabama prisons.

It says the inmates work against their will in ‘unsafe work conditions’ and the ADOC takes 40 percent of gross earnings claiming it is ‘to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration’.

In September 2023, the complaint says 1,374 incarcerated people were enrolled in the work program. 

One of the individuals involved in the complaint, Lakiera Walker, was imprisoned from 2007 to 2023. 

She said she was forced to perform long hours of uncompensated work ‘upon threat of discipline’.

Her jobs included housekeeping, stripping floors, providing care for mentally disabled or other ill incarcerated people, unloading chemical trucks, working inside freezers, and at Burger King. 

She said she was paid just $2 per day and was subjected to sexual harassment by a supervising officer.

When she was so ill she could not work, she said a supervisor told her to ‘get up and go make us our 40 percent’. 

She told Law&Crime: ‘Those women need help. They really need a voice. I knew I had to do something. I want justice for this forced labor.’ 

Keep reading

Daniel Williams, 22, dies after being ‘tied up, beaten and sexually assaulted for two days’ by prison gang – two weeks before he was due to be released from Alabama facility after a 12-month sentence for theft

An Alabama inmate has died after days of being tortured, beaten and sexually assaulted by a prison gang – just two weeks before he was due to be released, his family claim.

Daniel Williams, 22, was serving a 12-month sentence for second-degree theft at Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama when a warden found him unresponsive in his dorm on October 22.

The father-of-two was declared brain dead upon his arrival at the hospital and provided palliative care, his family said in a GoFundMe campaign. He was taken off life support on November 5 and died four days later.

The warden allegedly told his family that Williams suffered a ‘drug overdose’, but insiders at the prison told the Alabama Political Reporter that he had been ‘kidnapped, bound, assaulted and sold out’ by another inmate for ‘two or three days’.

At least 12 prison cops at Staton Correctional Facility – along with adjoining Elmore and Draper prisons – have been arrested for assaulting inmates in the last two years. 

Federal investigators have also been probing the state of Alabama and its prisons since a scathing lawsuit was lodged by the Department of Justice in 2019. 

Keep reading

Alabama’s next death penalty atrocity: The execution of Casey McWhorter

30 years after a murder committed by three teenage boys, Alabama plans to execute one of them, Casey McWhorter, who was just three months past his 18th birthday at the time of the crime. (McWhorter’s co-defendants were 15 and 16, respectively.)

Any argument in favor of executing McWhorter is undercut by the illogical, unbending brutality of a bright-line legal rule established by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the Court held the 8th and 14th Amendments prohibit the execution of defendants younger than age 18, but, not the execution of juveniles like McWhorter whom — mentally and emotionally — under any reasonable interpretation, were children at the time of their crime(s). This is because of Roper’s legal fiction that childhood rigidly ends at 18 years of age — on the nose — and not a day, or as in McWhorter’s case, 3 months, older. Describing that period in his life to a reporter recently, McWhorter said: “I had issues in my head that I didn’t know how to work out.”

Keep reading

State Cleared to Use Never-Before-Seen Execution Method on Murderer of Preacher’s Wife

A divided Alabama Supreme Court has ruled in favor of using nitrogen gas as a method of execution, marking the first instance of the method being considered for carrying out a death sentence.

The all-Republican court, in a 6-2 decision issued on Wednesday, granted the state attorney general’s request for an execution warrant for Kenneth Eugene Smith. Smith was one of two individuals convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett in northwestern Alabama. The specific execution date will be determined later by Governor Kay Ivey.

This decision brings Alabama closer to becoming the first state to pursue nitrogen gas as an execution method. However, it is likely that further legal challenges will emerge before this method is actually used. Other states like Oklahoma and Mississippi have also authorized nitrogen hypoxia for executions, a process in which an inmate breathes pure nitrogen and is deprived of the oxygen required for survival. While advocates argue it may be painless, opponents liken it to unethical human experimentation.

Keep reading

‘Outrageous and flatly unconstitutional’: Lawyer decries arrest of Alabama journalists

Police arrested a southwestern Alabama newspaper publisher and a reporter for publishing an article that prosecutors say was based on confidential grand jury evidence.

Don Fletcher reported for the Atmore News on an investigation into the local school board’s payments to seven former school employees that Escambia County district attorney says broke the law against revealing grand jury proceedings, and both the reporter and publisher Sherry Digmon were arrested and charged with a felony, reported the Washington Post.

“While it’s illegal for a grand juror, witness or court officer to disclose grand-jury proceedings, it’s not a crime for a media outlet to publish such leaked material, provided the material was obtained by legal means,” legal experts told the Post.

Theodore J. Boutrous, an attorney who has represented media organizations, said the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the First Amendment protects journalists who publish information of public importance, even if that information came from a source who broke the law.

“That applies to grand jury information, Boutrous said, calling the Alabama case “extraordinary, outrageous and flatly unconstitutional.”

The newspaper’s publisher and co-owner is a member of the county school board, and she voted recently against renewing the contract of the superintendent – who has been publicly supported by district attorney Stephen Billy.

“I wish I could [comment],” said Digmon, the publisher. “I would rather not answer. I can only refer you to my attorney.”

Keep reading

Alabama Cops Who Arrested Mechanic for Not Giving Them His ID Denied Qualified Immunity

A federal court has sided with Roland Edger, an Alabama man who says he was wrongfully arrested after he declined to give police officers his driver’s license in 2019. While a lower court had granted qualified immunity to the officers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned that decision, ruling that the officers clearly violated Edger’s Fourth Amendment rights and that Edger’s suit against them may go forward.

In June 2019, Edger, a mechanic in Huntsville, Alabama, received a call from a customer, who told him that his wife’s car had broken down and asked him to come out to repair it. The car was in the parking lot of a local church, where the customer’s wife worked. The customer told Edger he could pick up her keys at the church’s front desk.

When he arrived at the church on June 10, a few days after the customer had called, Edger retrieved the keys from the church and began inspecting the car. According to the ruling, Edger says he believed something was wrong with the car’s steering or tires and that he’d need to return with the necessary tools to fix the vehicle.

Keep reading

Alabama Judge Issues Ruling in Carlee Russell Hoax Case

An Alabama judge found Carlee Russell guilty of two misdemeanor charges after she faked her own abduction in July.

Hoover Municipal Court Judge Thomas Brad Bishop on Wednesday found Russell guilty on charges of false reporting of an incident and false reporting to law enforcement, both misdemeanors, according to FOX affiliate WBRC.

The state recommended one year in jail, the maximum, which is six months for each charge. They also recommended a fine of $831 and restitution of $17,974.88.

According to the report, the case will be appealed to circuit court.

Russell, 24, dialed 911 on July 13 at around 9:34 p.m. to report a toddler walking along the southbound side of Interstate 459 near Birmingham, according to the Hoover Police Department.

Keep reading