Who’s Gaming Who?
January 26th, 2024
When you think of the United States Supreme Court, you could puke. The misogyny, bribery, gaming of the political process to ensure the appointment of three Federalist sycophants and a right-wing majority…any of that could make you puke. But there’s figurative puking, and then there’s literal puking. And when we talk about the execution of Kenneth Smith by the state of Alabama, in which the United States Supreme Court was complicit in every way, we’re talking about literal puking.
Thankfully it didn’t come to that. Experts thought there was a reasonable chance Mr. Smith might throw up into his mask and die from choking rather than the nitrogen gas with which the state was poisoning him. No, the best Alabama could do, per the witnesses to his execution, was to make Mr. Smith thrash and writhe while torturing him to death. And while Alabama was committing the first execution by nitrogen hypoxia in American history – a means of execution reminiscent of World War Two fascism – the six-person “conservative” majority was utterly silent. It was left to Justice Sotomayor to point out that the world was watching in horror while the Court allowed a state to “experiment…with a human life.”
The irony of this shameful display is that it overshadows two other shameful displays. First, the state had botched its attempt to kill Mr. Smith a year earlier by trying and failing over the course of ninety minutes to find a vein within which to inject poison. After all that effort, you have to think that Mr. Smith really deserved killing. And thus the second of the disgraceful ironies: the jury that heard his case didn’t want him executed in the first place. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Eleven of the twelve jurors felt that a life sentence was appropriate; but under a now-defunct rule, the presiding judge overrode the clear will of the jury and imposed a death sentence.
The ever-classy Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, declared that justice had been done “after more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system [by Mr. Smith].” In fact it was us who were gamed.