Justice has waited 35 years to hold Kenneth Smith accountable for his role in a 1988 Alabama murder-for hire.
The wait continues.
Condemned killer Smith doesn't like the idea of lethal injection. He believes the pain of the needle is cruel and unusual punishment and wants the gas chamber instead. Alabama allows execution by gas, but doesn't have the protocol in place just yet.
Smith sued. A federal appeals court ruled in his favor and stayed his execution. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the stay.
Alabama strapped Smith to a gurney in November but failed to properly set an IV before the death warrant expired that midnight.
On Monday, the nation's highest court declined to review the lower court's ruling. In essence, they said a condemned prisoner has a right to be executed by his preferred method if it is an option in the state.
Alabama is pondering what to do now. Looks like the state will have to build a gas chamber.
Maybe, since Smith's veins don't appear to be cooperating, Alabama should wait until it can carry out the execution using lethal gas. But Smith is just one condemned man.
It's a dangerous precedent that no doubt others on death will try to use. And a reversal of a ruling in 2019 against an Oklahoma prisoner who wanted to die by gas rather than injection. At the time, the justices said condemned inmates are not guaranteed a "painless" execution.
In our view, a killer condemened to death shouldn't have a say in how the sentence is carried out. Certainly their victims had no say in how they died.