Alabama killed a man, but he did not leave

I'm writing this in Alabama, where I am making a documentary on an execution. I don't know when it will come out. We are standing outside the gates of the prison, because that's as far as the guards will let us go.

I've been a journalist for a while, but I've never reported on an execution. My colleague Gaby has, once:

'I had talked to him for months. I knew what he was like. He was a person. So when he was executed, it was really terrible. I guess this one is a little different...'

She didn't finish the sentence. Those words look cold when I look at them on the screen now. But I remember how they felt when she said them: that maybe this one wouldn’t be as painful for her, because she didn't know this man at all.

It occurred to me, though I didn't say it, that maybe I should be glad I don't know much about the man being executed tonight. That way, he couldn’t take anything away from me when he left.

We saw a black van go into the prison gates. Gaby said that probably meant the execution was about to take place.

It was raining off and on all night. No point being sad and wet. So we sat in the rental car to wait. I hunched forward in the driver's seat, listening to the windshield wiper. I ate handfuls of trail mix. That's what it said on the bag, anyway: Cashew Trail Mix. Awful lot of M&Ms and caramels for a trail mix. More like Candy Mix with some cashews at the bottom.

Nitrogen hypoxia was promised as “the most humane method of execution known to man”. The Hypoxia part gives the phrase a sophisticated medical aura, but really it's just pumping nitrogen gas into a mask until someone suffocates. It certainly sounds less gruesome and invasive than firing squad, or guillotine, or hanging, or lethal injection.

Kenneth Smith had a lethal injection once, only it wasn't lethal. He was convicted in 1988 in a murder-for-hire plot. A preacher was having an affair, and gave Kenneth $1000 to kill his wife. A gruesome beating and eight stab wounds; two sons left behind. The cops figured out the preacher was behind it; he killed himself. Kenneth was put on trial. The jury wanted life imprisonment; they voted against execution. But the judge overrode that decision and put him on death row anyway.

Last year, Kenneth sat in a chair in the execution chamber. They couldn't find a vein. Four hours of unsuccessful jabbing later, they unbuckled him. He went back to his cell to wait.

Kenneth Smith now had a long Wikipedia article (there is none for the victim), as he was now on a short list: one of two Americans to ever survive an execution. He was about to enter an even shorter one: humans executed by nitrogen. He would be the first in the world.

The black van came back out of the prison gates followed by a small parade of official-looking vehicles with flashing blue lights. Gaby was now pretty confident that this was it. We got out of the car.

Another reporter was showing his colleague some pictures on his phone. I asked to look. It was photos of a plate of food from Waffle House. Apparently Kenneth had ordered Waffle House as his last meal, and the reporter had gone to the restaurant and taken pictures of the food.

What an absolutely Alabama thing to order as your last meal, I thought. Waffle House, the great equalizer. I’d just had some yesterday.

The centerpiece of Kenneth’s last meal was a T-bone steak, absolutely smothered in A-1. The next picture on the phone was a close-up of the A-1 bottle itself. I laughed out loud. The reporter hadn't ever had A-1 (he’s from London and doesn’t eat meat), and asked me what it was like, if it was good. I thought for a second, and said that yes it is good, if you like A-1. It's what you put on cheap steaks.

'Does it make steak taste better?'

Sort of. It makes it taste less like a bad steak and more like A-1, I said.

He laughed, then was sort of quiet. He looked sad. Sadder than I felt. Maybe because he’d met the man who made that meal. He’d touched the bottle. I hadn’t.

I was adjusting my camera when I felt a hand. A firm grip of my shoulder, then a rough slide across my back, into a sort of half-hug, and another grip.

I'd normally jump if someone came up behind me. I didn't this time, because there was something familiar about the touch.

'Hey, brother'.

It was the Reverend. The Rev Dr Jeff Hood was there as the spiritual advisor for Kenneth Smith, he was to be there in the room with him during his last moments. I remembered: I hadn't come to Alabama to think about a now-dead murderer I didn't know; I had come here to work. I was following Rev Hood for the week as he navigated all the press interviews, campaigning against the death penalty. This documentary was about him, mostly, not about Kenneth.

Rev Hood's eyes didn't really meet mine; he was in a hurry. He'd just come out of the execution chamber.

'Hey.'

I'm not sure he heard me; he was walking briskly toward a camera setup that CNN had arranged for him outside the prison gates. They had convinced him to give them the first exclusive interview upon exiting the execution chamber, and he'd agreed. I looked at him through my viewfinder as he patiently craned his neck so that the CNN producer could attach a lavalier microphone to the collar of his robe.

The live broadcast started immediately. I watched the Reverend talk. He was angry. 

The promise by the state of Alabama was that nitrogen hypoxia would render a condemned human unconscious in seconds, and dead in minutes. This didn't happen.

Kenny struggled, Rev Hood said. (He calls him Kenny).

Kenny gasped. His head was strapped to the gurney, but he bucked his head back and forth against the straps. He twisted. His face turned different colors. He spat and gurgled into the mask. Rev Hood said he might have vomited.

An article came out later that night from a reporter who was observing the execution from the other side of the glass. It had timestamps that said the whole thing lasted at 22 minutes.

Rev Hood didn't have the timetable in front of him right now. But he said the suffering was long, too long. That he'd been in the for executions before, and that he'd never seen anything as bad as this, ever.

He kept shaking his head. He said: “That was torture”. Then he paused and said it again, “that was torture”. As if saying it twice would draw a big circle around the phrase in the heads of the audience at home.

As the reporter asked more questions, I thought of something Rev Hood had said the day before to me: that he didn't often go to executed mens' graves. Partially because most of them were cremated and there was no body. But also, because each of the executed men stayed with him, because he knew them personally.

Kenny would stay with him. He probably now knew Kenny better than almost anyone at home who would be watching this interview.

This interview. I was here to do a job; to hold the camera. I zoomed in on the Reverend's face, trying to capture the raw emotion that he was showing and that I didn’t feel. To frame it so that when he occasionally gesticulated, his hand wouldn't pop into the frame and distract the viewer.

It distracted me. Every time I saw his hand, I thought about how that very same hand had just hugged my shoulder, and that only minutes before, that hand had been gripping Kenny's hand.

It occurred to me that I might be the first person he touched after he left the chamber.

Later, I watched the official press conference. I saw the Commissioner of Alabama Department of Corrections explain that Kenny's wretching and writhing was what they expected. “Involuntary movements,” as he described them. It took a long time because Kenny tried to hold his breath, he said. The suffering was his fault.

The Commissioner didn't say that last sentence, of course. That's me editorializing.

There was another press conference at a hotel just down the road from the prison, this one held by an anti-death penalty group. One of the speakers was a elderly man who had been on death row but was exonerated. He'd been on death row with Kenny. He spoke for a bit, about what kind of man Kenny was. He said Kenny was a born-again Christian (I'd heard this before), that he smiled a lot (I'd heard this before also). That he was generous, and that Kenny would give him coffee or other things when he needed it. I didn't know this; now I did.

Maybe what I was afraid of wasn't that Kenny would take something away from me. Maybe the problem is that he was now here with me. That the more I knew about him, the more I would feel something when I thought about him. That I would now be living with something ugly. I'm not saying I'd see him in the mirror or anything; just that he was starting to become more than a murderer, he was also becoming a person, like the person he killed, and the person who killed him. And I am also a person. And that I would sometimes feel that.

Like an occasional, uncomfortable, but familiar hand on the shoulder.

Afterwards, some of us went to the Waffle House, the same one I went to yesterday. I got an ice water; I wasn't hungry (thanks to the Cashew Trail Mix). A guy at the counter told me that this was the Waffle House where Kenny's last meal had come from (the chef who cooked it had just left). I didn’t know this; now I did.

The family of the murder victim was eating in the corner.

I didn't see what they ordered, but thinking about it now, I wonder if they had the same meal that Kenny had. I didn’t look that closely. I thought I saw a bottle of A-1 on the table.

I don’t think they knew.