Atmore, Alabama – A prisoner in Alabama was postponed Thursday from a planned lethal injection after the US Supreme Court said the state should allow its personal minister into the death room.
Willie B. Smith III’s lethal injection was called off by Alabama after judges upheld an injunction issued by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals stating that he could not be executed without his pastor in the room. Department of Corrections spokeswoman Samantha Rose said the execution would not go ahead given the ruling. Alabama has maintained that non-prison personnel are not allowed in the room for security reasons.
“Willie Smith has been sentenced to death, and his last wish is to have his pastor with him when he dies,” Judge Elena Kagan wrote in a concurrence with three other judges.
Alabama Department of Corrections via AP
“Alabama has not carried the task of showing that the exclusion of all members of the clergy from the execution room is necessary to ensure prison security. So the state cannot execute Smith now without his pastor present, because of what Smith said. “Transition between the worlds” calls to facilitate the living and the dead, “Kagan wrote. Judge Amy Coney Barrett joined three liberal judges to assert the ruling.
The case was the latest in a series of legal battles over personal spiritual advisers on executions. In 2019, the court stopped the execution of a Texas inmate who claimed his religious freedom would be violated if his Buddhist spiritual adviser were not allowed to be with him in the death chamber.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh suggested in a dissenting opinion that states wanting to avoid lawsuits on the matter should “find a way to admit spiritual advisers into the execution chamber, 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 returned from a cell by the execution room to his death row cell, a prison spokeswoman said.
51-year-old Smith was reportedly given a lethal injection in a prison in southern Alabama for the 1991 murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham in 1991.
Smith had tried to admit his spiritual adviser, Pastor Robert Wiley, into the execution chamber, something the state does not allow.
“Mr. Smith argued that he believes the transition point between life and death is important, and that the fact that his spiritual advisor is physically present at the time is an integral part of his faith,” Smith’s lawyers wrote in court. documents.
In the past, Alabama routinely placed a Christian prison pastor, who was employed by the state, in the execution room to pray with an inmate upon request. The state stopped the practice after a Muslim prisoner asked for an imam to be present. The prison system, which did not employ a Muslim cleric, said non-prison staff would not be allowed into the room.
Prosecutors said Smith kidnapped Johnson at gunpoint from an ATM, stole $ 80 from her, 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 a woman whose only crime was to stop using the ATM,” state lawyers wrote in court documents to allow the lethal injection to take place.
Judges cleared another residence issued by the 11th Circuit in connection with Smith’s intellectual capacity. His lawyers argued that the state had failed to assist the man, who has an IQ of less than 75, with forms affecting the timing of his execution. The Alabama Attorney General’s office in lawsuits disputed that Smith is disabled, calling it a last-minute delay maneuver.
Had the execution gone ahead, it would have been the first by a state in 2021 and one of the few at the state level since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, no state has had an execution since July 8.
After a 17-year hiatus on federal executions, President Trump resumed them in July. By December, the US government had been executed more people within the year than all states that still carry out executions. The US put 13 people to death before President Biden took office, including three this year.