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Convicted murderer Kenneth Smith was executed last year after being administered nitrogen gas - becoming the first death row inmate to be killed in such a way.
However, this wasn’t the first time he found himself strapped to the gurney, having famously endured a botched execution attempt two years before.
Smith was convicted of the 1988 contract killing of Elizabeth Sennett, having been recruited by her husband Charles Sennett Sr to carry out the hit with a man named John Forrest Parker.
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The 45-year-old was attacked with a fireplace implement and stabbed in the chest and neck, before her home was staged to look like she had been a victim of a burglary gone wrong.
While Parker was executed via lethal injection in 2010, it wasn’t until 2022 that Smith faced his fate - well, first faced his fate.
His execution ended up being called off after Department of Corrections Department staff were unable to find a second intravenous line to administer the drugs.
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Smith's lawyers later filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, where Smith described the ordeal he faced.
His Second Amended Complaint, which challenged his execution by lethal injection based on Alabama’s history of botched executions, said: “As the night progressed, as Mr. Smith was subjected to ever-escalating levels of pain and torture, no one responded to his pleas to stop the pain, told him of the Eleventh Circuit’s stay, or answered his questions about what they were doing to him. They were - and he thought they were - executing him.”
He allegedly spent hours strapped to the gurney after the execution was called off, unaware that he was no longer due to die that day.
Smith had apparently told a team member that the executioners were inserting the needle painfully into his muscle, but they allegedly responded: “No I’m not.”
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It’s believed Smith was then injected with ‘some sort of sedative and/or anaesthetic’ - something he had ‘specifically objected to’, before an individual of ‘unknown medical credentials … started repeatedly stabbing [Smith’s] collarbone area with a large needle’ in a bid to start placing a central IV line.
A prison official ‘grabbed and held [Smith’s] head away from the area where the needle was being inserted’, at which point he described a sharp and intense pain, ‘as though he were being “stabbed” in the chest’.
The individual ‘repeatedly jabbed him … underneath his collarbone’.
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Around 11.20pm, reports began to circulate that Smith’s execution had been called off, with the execution team telling him just before midnight: “It’s over with.”
When the guards came to collect Smith from the chamber, he was reportedly trembling, sweating, hyperventilating and dizzy, and was unable to lift his own arms to be handcuffed or walk unaided.
Smith was eventually killed in January last year, with officials this time using nitrogen gas.
He is said to have shaken violently, writhed and convulsed as he died.
Jess Hardiman