Alabama is preparing to execute a man convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher's wife on Thursday evening.
Kenneth Eugene Smith, 57, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore at 6 p.m. CT.
Prosecutors said Smith and another man were each paid $1,000 to kill Elizabeth Sennett by her husband Reverend Charles Sennett, who was in deep debt and wanted to collect on insurance. He killed himself a week after his wife's death, when the murder investigation started to focus on him as a suspect.
John Forrest Parker, the other man convicted in the killing, was executed in 2010.
Smith was sentenced to death by a judge in 1996, despite a jury voting 11-1 to recommend that he receive life imprisonment.
His execution is set to go ahead after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Smith's request for a stay in a brief order on Wednesday.
His attorneys had challenged the constitutionality of judicial override, noting that no U.S. states currently allow judges to override a jury's sentencing recommendation in death penalty cases. Alabama became the last state to abolish the practice in 2017, but the change was not retroactive and therefore didn't affect Smith.
If Smith's trial "had occurred today, he could not have been eligible for execution," his attorneys wrote in the petition to the High Court.
"Nor would he be subject to execution anywhere else in the United States, as every state that once permitted the practice of judicial override has abandoned it."
Smith's final appeals also cited Alabama's difficulties with IV lines in recent scheduled lethal injections.
Joe Nathan James Jr. was put to death in July after hours of delays in an execution that advocacy groups described as botched. And in September, Alabama called off Alan Miller's execution after difficulty accessing his veins.
"Alabama appears determined to persist with lethal injection, no matter how many executions its officials catastrophically mishandle," Reprieve U.S. director Maya Foa told Newsweek on Thursday.
"Alan Miller, Joe James and Doyle Lee Hamm were all strapped to the gurney for hours and stabbed repeatedly with needles, but the state is pressing ahead with Kenneth Smith's execution regardless, using the same broken procedure.
"Just last night, in Texas, officials took an hour and a half to kill Stephen Barbee because his disability made it hard to find a usable vein. In Arizona, staff reportedly failed to insert IVs into both Murray Hooper's arms before inserting a catheter into his femoral vein near his groin."
Foa said this "spate of disastrous lethal injection executions shows that whatever the drug, whatever the protocol, condemned prisoners often spend their final hours in agonizing pain and distress. With each gruesome scene in the death chamber, we are witnessing the consequences of persisting with a broken method of execution in real time."
The Alabama Department of Corrections has been contacted for comment.
Smith's execution is among four that were scheduled to take place across the U.S. over the course of 48 hours.
Richard Fairchild is set to receive a lethal injection in Oklahoma on Thursday morning. Hooper was executed in Arizona on Wednesday morning, followed by Barbee in Texas hours later.
Update 11/17/22, 9 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Maya Foa.
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