Finalist: Elizabeth Bruenig of The Atlantic

What did the state of Alabama do to Joe Nathan James in the three hours before his execution?

This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin.

A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to a vein so an execution team could deliver the lethal injection of drugs that would kill him. Despite the long delay and an unnaturally short execution, the Department of Corrections had assured media witnesses gathered to observe James’s death that “nothing out of the ordinary” had happened in the course of killing the 50-year-old. It was suspicion of that claim that led to this private autopsy.

By the time I arrived at the morgue where Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University and a lethal-injection opponent, had agreed to join a local independent pathologist named Boris Datnow and his assistant, Jay Glass, James’s body had undergone days of postmortem swelling in cool storage. Datnow would later caution me about the difficulty of our inquiry—the edema had diminished our chances of locating punctures left by needles during the execution—though my initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex. That and the carnage farther up one arm told a radically different tale than the narrative offered by the Alabama Department of Corrections, even to the naked eye. Something terrible had been done to James while he was strapped to a gurney behind closed doors without so much as a lawyer present to protest his treatment or an advocate to observe it, yet the state had insisted that nothing unusual had taken place. Approached for comment about the allegations contained in this article, Department of Corrections officials declined to speak with me.

Obdurate disregard for genuine inquiries seems to be the state’s disposition where capital punishment is concerned. In the months prior to James’s execution, Faith Hall’s brother Helvetius and her two daughters, Terrlyn and Toni, lobbied Governor Kay Ivey to spare the man’s life, repeatedly stating that they had forgiven James and had no desire to see him killed. (The Halls, like James, are Black.) Nevertheless, the execution, scheduled for 6 p.m., went ahead unhindered, with Ivey explaining her office’s disregard for the victim’s family’s wishes as a matter of principle.

When members of the media who had been selected to witness James’s execution arrived for their transport to William C. Holman Correctional Facility’s death chamber, two female journalists, the Associated Press’s Kim Chandler and AL.com’s Ivana Hrynkiw, were subjected to dress-code checks by prison staff, who demanded that Hrynkiw change from a skirt into a borrowed pair of men’s fishing waders and sneakers before allowing her to proceed as a witness. By the time everyone was shod and apparreled to the DOC’s specifications and loaded onto prison transport vans, it was 6:33 p.m. (I had contacted the agency about applying to witness James’s execution, but had been ignored.)

And then, media witnesses reported, they waited—for hours. Prisoners on Holman’s death row held up signs—a captive message from a captive audience—stating that the victim’s family didn’t want James dead, that this was a murder. Time passed, then more: Finally, around 9 o’clock, roughly three hours after the scheduled time of execution, media witnesses were led into the execution chamber.

I have witnessed two executions, and in both cases the men were alert and responsive to corrections staff in the moments prior to lethal injection. After all, multidrug cocktails including paralytics and sedatives only begin to affect a person’s consciousness after administration. Before the injections begin, the men I’ve seen die have spoken at least briefly of love and regret. But James neither responded to his death warrant nor gave any last words—not even a refusal to offer a final statement, per Kim Chandler. In fact, witnesses, including Chandler and Hrynkiw, reported that James’s eyes stayed closed during the entire procedure, flickering only in his death throes, and that he remained unresponsive from beginning to end. His death warrant was read at 9:03 p.m., the lethal drugs began to flow at 9:04, and he was declared dead, finally, at 9:27.

What happened to James during the three-hour interval between his scheduled execution and his time of death, and why was he apparently unconscious in the execution chamber? The Alabama DOC gave the gathered reporters no explanation for the long delay, or for his strange demeanor in the chamber. Pressed for an explanation by journalists on the scene that night, John Hamm, the corrections department commissioner, said, in somewhat scattered fashion, that he couldn’t “overemphasize this process. We’re carrying out the ultimate punishment, the execution of an inmate. And we have protocols and we’re very deliberate in our process, and making sure everything goes according to plan. So if that takes a few minutes or a few hours, that’s what we do.”

Subsequent official statements only confused matters further. For instance, DOC spokesperson Kelly Betts wrote in an email to members of the media that “ADOC’s execution team strictly followed the established protocol. The protocol states that if the veins are such that intravenous access cannot be provided, the team will perform a central line procedure. Fortunately, this was not necessary and with adequate time, intravenous access was established.” Eventually, the DOC conceded that it could not confirm whether James had been “fully conscious” during the lethal-injection procedure, though it assured journalists that he had not been sedated.

Aside from the DOC, nobody seemed especially satisfied with that account of events. Jim Ransom, the last of many defense attorneys to represent James, was especially disturbed when he heard that his client hadn’t responded to the warden’s prompt to offer his last words. “That sent up red flags. It didn’t ring true,” Ransom told me the night of the autopsy. “Joe always had something to say. Joe would’ve said no,” Ransom insisted, if he didn’t have anything to say: “That’s Joe.” (Ransom told me that James had asked that he not be present the night of the execution.) But somehow during the three-and-a-half-hour delay, James had transformed from a devout Muslim and dedicated jailhouse lawyer who, in Ransom’s telling, “wanted to fight ’em to the very last minute” into someone mute and absent, with neither an apology for his victim’s family nor an utterance of gratitude for their efforts to save his life.

I spoke with Helvetius, Hall’s brother, in the days after the autopsy. He told me that he wasn’t especially shocked by James’s silence, but that he was appalled by the state’s. In the weeks leading up to the execution, Helvetius said, “Nobody called us, nobody reached out to us, nobody—nobody—got in touch with us.” Toni, Faith’s youngest daughter, who was a toddler when her mother was killed, told me she had repeatedly asked the district attorney’s office to let her speak with James prior to his execution, only to be refused. “There could have been a conversation to heal a little 3-year-old’s heart,” she said, pausing to swallow tears. But nobody in any position of power, aside from Alabama State Representative Juandalynn Givan, who lobbied the state on behalf of the family, seemed particularly interested in what would bring her or her family peace, much less a sense of closure. They simply wanted James dead.

A clinician of 27 years, Joel Zivot worked mainly in intensive-care units and operating rooms before investigating the disappearance of sodium thiopental (an erstwhile anesthetic recruited into lethal-injection cocktails) from the American market circa 2010, due to capital punishment. Zivot’s curiosity about the vanishing of a good drug eventually led him to research lethal-injection protocols, at which point he became a vocal critic of the death penalty’s use of medical means for lethal ends. Now, having published papers on the bioethical hazards of physician participation in lethal injection and having testified about his research into the end-of-life suffering evinced by the autopsy reports of executed prisoners, Zivot has become a familiar presence in legal challenges to executions nationwide. Friendships across the anti-capital-punishment advocacy domain made him especially well placed to set up the independent autopsy of Joe James. Within two days of the execution, Zivot had heard rumors about errors, and he began working in earnest to probe the man’s death.

Before any exam could take place, James’s next of kin would have to agree. I connected Zivot with Ransom to reach out to James’s family. “I had my suspicions about the time lapse,” Ransom explained, “and I feel like the state needs to be held accountable when they mess up.” With that in mind, he called Hakim James, one of Joe Nathan James’s brothers, whose mother had charged him with handling his brother’s final affairs, and asked if he would agree to submit James’s body to an independent autopsy.

Hakim considered, then gave his consent. “I felt it needed to be done,” he told me later, even though it came at the end of an already protracted, taxing process. “I felt that it was important.”

Then there was the matter of locating an independent pathologist willing to take on the case, and finding the money to pay them. I suggested that Zivot reach out to Reprieve, a nonprofit civil-rights organization made up of lawyers, advocates, and investigators who defend the rights of people facing extreme abuses. Maya Foa, an executive director at Reprieve USdirector, agreed that an independent autopsy ought to happen—quickly.

“Lethal injection was developed to mask the very torture it inflicts,” she explained over text message, “and when a prisoner is executed in secret, the only person who can tell the world what really happened is dead. We’ve seen time and again states suppressing or delaying autopsy results following executions that appear to have gone disastrously wrong. Autopsies help tell the story that the body leaves behind.” Reprieve agreed to fund the autopsy through its newly launched Forensic Justice Initiative. By Tuesday morning, Zivot was en route to Alabama from Atlanta and I was making my way from my home in New England; we met in Birmingham, and then went together to the funeral home where the autopsy was to be performed.

The human body opened along “a standard Y-incision”—across the breast and down the center of the abdomen—was unmistakably that of Joe Nathan James. His head was encased in a clear plastic bag, laid to one side, and his face was slack and ashen. The state of Alabama had already wrought its work twice upon James: First in the execution itself, and then again in the autopsy carried out at the Mobile medical examiner’s office immediately after, the findings of which would not be made available for a minimum of 90 days, in the optimistic estimation of local capital defenders. And while the array of viscera and the accordion-style slicing of organs was appalling in its bloody gratuitousness—James had been, according to Datnow, a generally healthy man, prior to his execution—it was the story his flesh told about his lengthy and painful death that lent the scene its awful vertigo. In a little green storefront funeral parlor in Birmingham lay the visual record of everything the government can do to you, provided that you, like James in his final hours, have no counsel present, no wealth to your name, and no contact with the outside world.

James, it appeared, had suffered a long death. The state seems to have attempted to insert IV catheters into each of his hands just above the knuckles, resulting in broad smears of violet bruising. Then it looked as though the execution team had tried again, forcing needles into each of his wrists, with the same bleeding beneath the skin and the same indigo mottling around the puncture wounds. On the inside of James’s left arm, another puncture site, another pool of deep bruising, and then, a scant distance above, a strange, jagged incision, at James’s inner elbow. The laceration met another cut at an obtuse angle. That longer, narrower slice was part of a parallel pair, which matched a fainter, shallower set of parallel cuts. Underneath the mutilated portion of James’s arm was what appeared to be yet another puncture—a noticeable crimson pinprick in the center of a radiating blue-green bruise. Other, less clear marks littered his arm as well.

Mark Edgar, a pathologist at the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, reviewed my photos from James’s autopsy and concluded in an email that all of the wounds on James’s arm happened before death, judging by the redness along the edges of the wounds. One among them—the deeper, wider cut at James’s elbow—suggested, in Edgar’s view, “that the inmate moved suddenly while the central cut was being placed, possibly in an attempt to access a vein.”

Zivot, upon examining the body, agreed that the incision carved into James’s arm was most likely made in the death chamber, in an attempt to expose a vein that execution staff could see. The medical term for the procedure is cutdown, and its aftermath dismayed Zivot. “The use of a cutdown in this situation is a stark departure from what would be done in a medical setting,” he explained in an email. “I can’t tell if local anesthetic was first infused into the skin, as slicing deep into the skin with a sharp surgical blade in an awake person without local anesthesia would be extremely painful. In a medical setting, ultrasound has virtually eliminated the need for a cutdown, and the fact that a cutdown was utilized here is further evidence that the IV team was unqualified for the task in a most dramatic way.”

The absence of a local anesthetic during a cutdown, however, could explain two other unusual features of James’s execution: the shallow lacerations lining his arm, and the fact that he was evidently unresponsive during the entire lethal-injection procedure witnessed by the media.

Edgar observed that the “roughly parallel” incisions did “not appear to be part of any procedure,” but were “more consistent with trauma in my opinion, presumably incurred during a struggle that took place during the prolonged efforts to gain access to a vein.” If James had struggled profoundly enough to tear his own flesh with his restraints, that in itself may have prevented IV access. In that case, members of the execution team may have resorted to sedating James.

“I also see several puncture marks not in the anatomical vicinity of a known vein,” Zivot wrote in his assessment. “It is possible that this just represents gross incompetence, or some, or one, or more of these punctures were actually intramuscular injections. An intramuscular injection in this setting would only be used to deliver a sedating medication.”

With roughly one minute elapsing between the reading of James’s death warrant and the rush of poison into his veins, per witness accounts, it scarcely seems that anyone involved in his execution expected him to offer last words. Further, the DOC’s own admission that it cannot confirm James’s consciousness during the procedure raises an obvious question: Why? James had been alone in DOC custody for the past three hours, presumably undergoing repeated, torturous, abortive efforts to gain lethal access to one of his veins. If something had happened to James during that period that affected his consciousness, only DOC staff would know, and the agency’s complete failure to account for the last hours of James’s life or the awful suffering inflicted upon him before his death is ghastly, the sort of catastrophic, pseudo-medicinal brutality of our recent past that mainly flourishes behind closed doors.

Alabama had good reason to think it would never be held to account for what happened to James: He was, at the time of his death, entirely alone, having sought no attendees for his death. In fact, Ransom told me, James had been representing himself in a couple of pending matters before federal courts at the time of his execution, meaning that if he was indeed sedated at some point, what slim semblance of legal counsel he had—his own wits and abilities—was extinguished before his execution.

The thought troubled Ransom. If he had been present, he told me, he would have intervened on James’s behalf. There would have been precedent for that kind of intercession: As recently as 2018, Alabama was forced to halt the execution of Doyle Hamm after execution staff punctured his body at least 11 times in his ankles, legs, and groin, apparently even piercing his bladder over a three-hour period. Hamm’s attorney, Bernard Harcourt, was there that evening, demanding an explanation for the long delay and preparing a legal offensive for the morning. Hamm’s case has since become emblematic of the grotesque reality of lethal injection, compared with its putatively sterile, professional public-facing aesthetics. Lethal injections largely happen, quite literally, behind a curtain; what observers do see looks vaguely surgical; what they don’t looks like a war crime.

“The details of the torture inflicted on Joe James are tragic, but unfortunately no surprise to anyone who has had a client executed in Alabama with lethal injection,” John Palombi, an assistant federal defender, told me in an email. “Adding to the torture is the refusal of the Alabama Department of Corrections to admit or accurately discuss the issues with Mr. James’ execution … There should be an immediate moratorium on all executions in the state of Alabama until a thorough investigation of Alabama’s execution process, done by people outside the Department of Corrections, is complete.”

Megan McCracken, a lawyer based in Philadelphia with expertise in execution methods, told me in an email that, “It is only because of the total lack of transparency surrounding executions in Alabama that the DOC was able to spend such a long time on failed IV access attempts. If this process had been performed openly in front of witnesses, such that anyone outside the DOC knew what was happening at the time, the attempts likely would have been stopped. It is hard to imagine that the courts would countenance this kind of harrowing procedure, but when DOCs can shield their actions and make them invisible to the public, there is no accountability.”

Deborah Denno, a law professor and the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at Fordham Law School, emphasized to me that James’s case is only the latest in a long sequence of botched executions that challenge the constitutionality of lethal injection on Eighth Amendment grounds. “From the very first lethal injection execution to the last—that of Joe Nathan James—the method is predictably disastrous, all the more so in the last dozen years given the lack of availability of drugs,” Denno wrote to me in an email. “James’s execution not only resembles the execution botches of the 1980s, it is even more egregious given the excessive lack of care and prison officials’ indifference to the safeguards of the execution process.”

Which is not to say that the state of Alabama will pay any particular heed to this investigation or its aftermath. There is no lobby for dead men. Execution states—24 remain—are, more and more, retreating into secrecy and elaborate privacy laws to hide their execution means and methods. Some states, like Alabama, simply ignore press inquiries into their executions or, as in this case, subject journalists to inexplicable delays and bland, unconvincing evasions. It appears that the state thought no one would catch it at what it was doing, and in most cases it would be correct; that alone is haunting. That it may haunt Faith Hall’s family evidently mattered not a jot to the state of Alabama.

The Halls, having fought for James’s life, were dismayed and outraged by the news of his torturous death. In Helvetius’s view, he said, Governor Ivey “was wrong for not contacting the victim’s family in any fashion, and she was wrong with her statement that Faith Hall got justice. This is not what she would have wanted. And we deserve an apology for that.”

Toni Hall agreed, as did State Representative Givan.

The family “simply wanted to be heard,” Givan told me. “They wanted an acknowledgment that they were victims and that their voices were listened to and that their concerns were weighed seriously. And I wonder: If they had been white, Anglo-Saxon Americans, would the governor or Attorney General Steve Marshall have at least returned their phone calls?”

Givan reflected that the entire sequence of events had been a grand indignity visited upon a family struggling to heal for more than 25 years, which concluded with the state’s utter indifference to their wishes and with James, the object of their attempted mercy, evidently too incapacitated on his deathbed to offer the barest apology.

But there is reason to believe that he intended to.

I spoke with two prisoners on Holman’s death row who had known James, spent some of those long years with him, seen him age and change into an older, different man—a committed Muslim who prayed regularly and devoted much of his time to studiously pursuing his own defense, not just for his own purposes, but for the sake of his friends on the row.

One of them told me that James had planned three items for his final words: To apologize to his mother and daughters, to apologize to the Hall family, and to pray the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. He felt grateful for the family’s advocacy on his behalf, even startled by it, by the abrupt unilaterality of forgiveness. But he trusted it, and he appreciated it, and he needed it.

James still hadn’t chosen the exact words he meant to say, the second prisoner told me. The mind revolts at such closely considered finalities, and James had more reason than most to hope for mercy. Somewhere deep inside, he believed the Halls’ forgiveness had saved him.

This story is part of the Atlantic’s Inside America’s Death Chambers series supported by the Public Welfare Foundation.

What happened when Alabama tried and failed to kill Alan Eugene Miller

At Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, Alabama, the prisoners have a tradition of beating their doors when guards take a man from the holding area colloquially known as the “death cell” to the execution chamber to be killed. More than 150 men slam their full strength against solid steel, rolling thunder down the halls. It’s a show of solidarity with the condemned man—not because he is presumed innocent or absolved, but because the men of death row are uncommonly aware of death’s uncompromising egalitarianism. It’s coming for all of us, and they mean it when they say it.

Death came for Joe Nathan James Jr. on July 28 of this year, but the lethal-injection procedure that followed the prisoners’ last cage-rattling display of camaraderie stretched to roughly three hours, resulting in multiple needle-puncture sites and, eventually, what appears to have been a venous cutdown, or an incision into James’s inner arm meant to reveal a vein. (This is not, quite obviously, what is supposed to happen.) Yet in the immediate aftermath of James’s execution, John Hamm, the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, claimed that “nothing out of the ordinary” had taken place in the course of his killing, which might’ve passed for public knowledge had The Atlantic not published the results of an independent autopsy staged shortly after James’s death. I was there at the autopsy and saw for myself what they had done to him, all the bruised puncture sites and open wounds. I confess I had hoped the facts of what happened to James might prompt some hesitation among Alabama’s legislators about rushing to lethally inject another man. But no Corrections Department representative ever so much as responded to my questions, much less the substance of the reporting: The next execution date kept drawing nearer.

Thus that dreadful clanging boomed through Holman prison again last Thursday, September 22, at roughly 9:25 p.m.—less than half an hour after a lawyer known in death-penalty-litigation circles as “the death clerk” notified Alan Eugene Miller’s defense attorneys that the Supreme Court of the United States had rejected Miller’s final plea, allowing the state of Alabama to proceed with his scheduled execution. The notification, which soon reached attorneys for the state of Alabama and officials at Holman, began a roughly three-hour countdown to midnight, at which time Miller’s death warrant would expire, legally prohibiting the state from any further efforts to execute him until another warrant could be secured—something that takes at least a month’s time. The general public was made aware of the Supreme Court’s ruling at 9:15 p.m. It came down without any stated reasoning from the Court at all, along with a split: Amy Coney Barrett, a reliable conservative, had voted with Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to stay Miller’s execution, pitting the Court’s women against the Court’s men.

By the end of that surreal odyssey of a night, when Miller was suspended vertically from a cross-shaped table, hands and one foot bleeding in an execution chamber and the state of Alabama apparently realizing it wouldn’t be able to kill him within the time it had, Barrett’s dissent would seem wise, even prescient. But that would come later. Shortly after we heard the Court’s decision, those of us whom Miller had chosen to witness his execution—his sister Cheryl Ellison; brother Jeff Carr; sister-in-law, Sandra Carr; uncle Richard Carr; attorney Mara Klebaner; and me—gathered in front of the Wind Creek casino in Atmore, where the Alabama Department of Corrections elects to rendezvous with witnesses. We passed the time in strained banter until about 10:24 p.m., when a white Alabama Department of Corrections van pulled up in the casino’s pick-up lane, and a blue-uniformed guard emerged to direct us inside.

The strip of rainbow neon crowning the casino slumped below the black horizon in the van’s rearview mirror. As broad highway narrowed to country road, thick pine woods enclosed us, ringing with cricket and katydid calls. The van passed through gated checkpoints and razor-wire fences, orange floodlights scattering the shadows. The driver and a uniformed corrections officer who rode with him herded us through a guard shack outfitted with a metal detector, then took our phones and identification. A second van drove us a negligible distance up the gated road to the execution chamber.

At 10:30 p.m., two uniformed guards guided us, again, out of the van. This time we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac terminating in the high walls and slit windows of Holman’s death row. The squat building sat beside us, its heavy door cracking open, occasionally, startlingly, to spill light into the dimness. But no word came from within. And so we paced, and waited.

Jeff Carr, Miller’s brother, wandered alone, contemplative. I walked alongside him after a moment, and looked up into his face to find him chagrined, almost, to have tears in his eyes. All night, Miller’s family had carried on this way: good-humoredly, irreverently, and with flinty resolve—but always warm, never forbidding. Neither Alan Miller nor any of his family members have ever disputed that Miller shot and killed three people—Lee Holdbrooks, Christopher Scott Yancy, and Terry Jarvis—during a delusional episode in 1999 that, according to testimony heard at trial, caused Miller to believe the men had been spreading rumors about him. In fact, nobody in Miller’s family present that night registered a general objection to the death penalty—only to torture.

I asked Jeff if he was a praying man. He said he was, and that he’d been doing plenty of that. In the final days of a prisoner’s life, the Alabama Department of Corrections permits extended visitation with close relatives and a spiritual adviser, but the rules for their meetings are exacting. A prisoner’s family members may share a meal with him but aren’t allowed to eat food from the prison’s cafeteria or to bring in their own; instead, they’re permitted only the soda, candy, and packaged snacks in the on-premises vending machines, a requirement that had forced Alan’s younger brother, Richard Miller, and Jeff, each diabetic, to choose between getting sick or losing precious time with Alan to leave prison grounds to eat. They chose high blood sugar and nausea, and stayed with Alan as long as they could.

Standing beside Jeff outside death row, I spent a moment feeling despondent. Since my reporting in August on the last execution that took place on these prison grounds—the botched killing of Joe Nathan James—I have exchanged text messages with several people at Holman, both incarcerated and employed. I often begin my messages with a circle and a slash, like a person waving hello. I looked up and, high inside the prison, saw a man holding a sign: \o.

Earlier that day, I had sent an email to spokespeople for the Corrections Department, asking whether they had changed their execution protocol after James’s execution, whether they had trained their staff to establish venous access on a patient of Miller’s weight—350 pounds—and whether, in the event they could not, they planned to perform a cutdown in the prisoner’s arm, which is not permitted by their protocol, or if they hoped to perform a central-line procedure, which is. I wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t responded to me; they almost never do. In fact, because all of my efforts to serve as a media witness for the state’s last two executions had gone unanswered, I approached Miller with the idea of serving as a personal witness for him. Miller, who was by then well aware of what had happened to James, agreed; Richard Miller lent me his seat among the six spots reserved for Miller’s choice of family and friends.

I asked one of the uniformed guards for the time. He told me that it was 10:53 p.m.—and then, calmly, but suddenly, and without any obvious provocation, the two uniformed guards supervising us, who had recently been joined by a Corrections employee wearing a suit and tie, instructed us to climb back into the idling van, which we did, confused and querying. We were told to wait, and we stared through the back windshield at the men as they turned their backs to the van and talked among themselves, gesturing with their arms and rubbing their faces. In about an hour, Miller’s death warrant would expire. The blue digital clock on the van’s dash was wrong by an odd number of hours and minutes, registering the time somewhere around 9:05. We matched the false hour with the real one given to us by the guard and kept time. It was a hot night, and condensation gathered on the windows as we talked anxiously. Richard worried Alan might be fighting his captors. Sandra Carr, his sister-in-law, worried that he might be hurt. Nobody in their family has good veins, she said. Especially not Alan.

In the distance, more prison vans idled, their headlights hovering on the horizon. Another vehicle passed them with red and blue sirens flashing—Bizarre, I thought—and then a stripe of light from the execution chamber opened the night, and we were unloaded into the death chamber shortly before 11:30 p.m.

What followed resembled other executions I have witnessed so much that I was certain Miller was about to die. We were led by wordless guards into a small tiled area focused on an indoor window, which, when unveiled, would provide a one-way view into an execution chamber. The witness room was an oddly proportioned hexagon with cinderblock walls; a glowing rose-pink fluorescent fixture lit three rows of chairs. Signs posted on the walls instructed us to stay seated and be quiet. A blue hospital curtain hung on the other side of the viewing window, in which I could see the reflections of Cheryl Ellison, Miller’s sister; Jeff; Richard; and Sandra. Their faces were muted and downcast now, as they waited for the veil to be drawn aside so the state could kill their loved one. Behind us, two uniformed guards stood by the room’s only door, and a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit swayed between them serenely, her eyes closed, rocking on her feet as though she were in church.

Mara Klebaner, Miller’s lawyer, asked for the time. One of the uniformed guards said that it was 11:35 p.m., meaning that the state had by then had about two and a half hours to set an IV line in Miller, and it still wasn’t ready to open the curtain and begin his execution. What on earth had Alabama done to the man?

On the other side of the window, Miller, too, remained under the impression that he was about to die.

Miller later recalled having been strapped down to a gurney at 10:25 p.m. with his arms outstretched, under glaring white tube lights in the same dimensions as his cruciform table. He remembered how the guards took his glasses, and how a trio of men in scrubs appeared and began attempting—unsuccessfully—to establish access to his veins. (Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment on this or other details reported in this story.)

Miller said the men were gentle, and that he asked them casually about the gruesome struggle to set an IV line in Joe Nathan James as they pushed needles into his arms, hands, and a foot. They cut their glances and declined to meet his eyes, he recalled, until one huffed: “Don’t believe everything you read.”

Over the next 60 to 90 minutes, Miller said, the men stared at, stroked, and punctured his skin in hopes of finding a vein—even producing a pocket flashlight to try to detect a vein visually, and then accepting the offer of a plainclothes corrections officer’s cellphone flashlight, but to little avail. Every puncture evidently failed. At one point, Miller remembered the men putting a foam ball in his hand and asking him to squeeze it, which he refused to do. The overhead lights blazed, and personnel moved around the room. Miller couldn’t always monitor the clock. Eventually, one of the men began to tap on the veins of Miller’s neck.

Miller recoiled sharply. Though the state’s protocol permits an execution team to set a central line—a venous catheter often set in the neck or groin—in the event that venous access cannot be established normally, teams had been notably unable or unwilling to successfully set IVs in those locations in other recently botched executions.

At about half past 11, Miller heard a sudden knocking on one of the death chamber’s windows. Someone affixed a strap over his chest and jacked the table into a vertical position, and the three men who had pushed needles into him over the past hour-plus departed the room. Miller was left hanging off the upright gurney, his hands and one foot bleeding from failed IV attempts, waiting to die.

After about 20 minutes, he estimates, of Miller asking aloud what was happening to him in the empty silence, an ADOC employee finally answered him, somewhere around five minutes to midnight: “Your execution has been postponed.” The gurney collapsed backward, suddenly flat again, and Miller said he saw white light.

If we had known any of this at the time, it may have come as less of a shock when a guard cracked open the door to the witness chamber and said simply: “You may exit.”

Miller’s family was stunned. “What?” Cheryl asked, staring in disbelief at the man who was now patiently directing us to file out of the prison. They had not yet so much as laid eyes on Miller. How could it be over?

“It’s been called off,” the man said placidly. We were given to understand that the “it” was the execution, but the circumstances of its cancellation—and the fate of Alan Miller—remained entirely unclear. As uniformed guards rushed us back onto the van, Miller’s lawyer and his family demanded to know where Miller was, and whether he was still alive. The guards said they didn’t know.

As the van pulled out of the prison grounds, we noticed an ambulance parked adjacent to the execution chamber, which immediately caught the attention of Miller’s sister-in-law and his brother, each retired paramedics. They worried something terrible had happened to Miller, and that the authorities had decided to rush him to a local hospital instead of going ahead with the execution—which, in lieu of any other information, made as much sense as anything.

The guards shooed us out of the van and deposited us in the casino parking lot without any further explanation of the night’s events; we had no idea whether Miller was dead or alive. While Miller’s brother Richard and his uncle, Richard Carr, gathered with other family members waiting at the casino, his lawyer, Sandra, Cheryl, and I rushed to Atmore Community Hospital, the nearest medical facility to the prison. If Miller were the one in the ambulance, we guessed they would take him there.

At 12:31 a.m., I began using my iPhone to film as an ambulance pulled into the hospital lot where we were already waiting, with a white Alabama Corrections Department transport van trailing behind it. But instead of backing into the ambulance bay, the ambulance came to a halt in a hospital parking spot. Klebaner, Miller’s lawyer, glanced in the back and was shocked to see that the person inside was not Miller. A single Corrections Department employee emerged from the transport van and said they knew nothing about Miller’s whereabouts or condition, but offered to call her supervisor to try to find out. Meanwhile, a paramedic emerged from the ambulance to tell me I wasn’t allowed to film. Five minutes later, a caravan of Atmore Police Department SUVs pulled in and a quartet of officers appeared, saying they had been summoned to deal with “a commotion.”

Klebaner explained to the officers the rather uncanny situation we found ourselves in: unable to locate a man who was supposed to be dead by now, with no clue as to his condition, or how we might go about finding him. The police admitted to being as baffled as we were.

But I couldn’t figure out who had been so troubled by our presence as to call the police, or why. None of us was screaming or shouting, much less behaving aggressively. We were stranded in a hospital parking lot in the middle of the night, soliciting updates from inmates and other attorneys as they came by text message and Twitter. At 12:58 a.m., news finally arrived. Terry Raybon, the warden of Holman prison, pulled into the hospital lot in a white Dodge sedan and parked alongside us, rolling his window down.

Immediately Klebaner asked if Miller was alive.

“Yeah, yeah,” Raybon said. “He is in his cell.”

At the end of his conversation with Klebaner, Raybon rolled up his window, zipped into a parking spot, took a loud phone call on speaker, and tore back out of the lot. He had promised us a phone call from a Corrections Department lawyer, and within a number of minutes a call did come to Klebaner, though it illuminated little about Miller’s whereabouts or condition.

On the other end of the line was Mary-Coleman Mayberry Roberts, the promised attorney, who explained to Klebaner with pleasant briskness that “the execution was simply called off due to the time constraints resulting from the lateness of the court proceedings,” a claim similar to what Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said in a press statement around that time. Roberts repeatedly told Klebaner that “nothing went wrong.” Miller was indeed alive and well and in his cell, and that was all she intended to say.

In fact, she seemed annoyed to be on the phone, perhaps displeased by the implication that she or the Corrections Department owed any explanation to Miller’s family, who had just spent the past several hours in whiplashing states of hope, horror, disbelief, shock, and suspense. Confronted with such a suggestion by Klebaner, she clarified her purpose. “Ma’am,” she said, “we called you as a courtesy because we understood that y’all were at the hospital and worried that that was Mr. Miller. I was calling to let you know it was not, that he is safe, and that’s all the information I have to give you at this time.”

Klebaner insisted that she be allowed to meet with her client at the earliest opportunity, and pressed Roberts to commit to a time at which they could, at the very least, schedule such a meeting. But Roberts demurred, peevishly, advising her to call during “regular business hours” and schedule an ordinary attorney-client visit. “This is ridiculous and it’s not helpful,” Roberts finally snapped, hanging up with a curt “Good evening” only a beat later.

Commissioner Hamm would tell reporters that the ambulance that left the prison that night had nothing to do with Miller’s execution. The back of the ambulance never opened while we remained, puzzled, in the hospital parking lot, and no further Corrections Department personnel arrived as far as I could see, only the lone driver of the transport van. The only thing I understood confidently by the time we left was that the Alabama Department of Corrections very much wanted us to go.

What do you do the night you were meant to die? Miller would later say that when he was told that his execution had been “postponed,” he was unaware that midnight was approaching and still certain he would die, and that when the gurney had been suddenly jolted backwards, throwing him into a supine position, his vision had split open to the white light above, and he had believed for half a second he really was dead. But then they had taken the restraints off of him and several guards had helped him to his feet, explaining, finally, that the first ADOC employee had been wrong—that it was after midnight, that the state could no longer touch him, that he had lived.

Miller said that they never returned him to his old cell that night, but rather placed him back in the death cell after a trip to the infirmary, and that the guards brought him a plate of catfish, green beans, and potatoes from the catering spread they’d brought in for the employees working the execution.

At some point after midnight, guards gave Miller a phone and allowed him to call his attorneys and family.

The slot machines were still rolling at 2 a.m. when we crossed back through the casino lobby, numb and wordless under a river of gleaming red and golden feathers suspended and lit from above. We crowded into the hotel room where Miller’s brother Richard had placed him on speaker phone, and we listened to the voice of a man who had just survived his own execution.

On Friday, September 23, the day after he was scheduled to die, Miller was permitted an extended visit with his attorney via federal-court order, during which time his injuries were photographed. The following day, he was assessed by a physician. That same judge also ordered “personnel employed, contracted by, or otherwise associated with Holman, the Alabama Department of Corrections, and Alabama Attorney General’s Office” to immediately preserve all of their communications relating to Miller’s attempted execution, “including e-mails, phone calls, text messages, notes, or any other form of communication, written or otherwise.” According to Klebaner, “Mr. Miller will continue to vigorously pursue his rights in the ongoing litigation against Commissioner Hamm, Warden Raybon, and Attorney General [Steve] Marshall, as well as explore all legal options available to him.”

Their litigation could help illuminate why the state of Alabama has at least thrice proved itself incapable of executing prisoners via lethal injection in ways that comport with the law, its own protocol, and common sense. Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an educational nonprofit organization, told me that Alabama’s latest failure to carry out an uncomplicated execution represented an endemic problem.

“This is the third execution in the last five years that Alabama has botched by virtue of their own incompetence in setting IV lines,” offering Joe Nathan James and Doyle Hamm, who survived a 2018 lethal injection attempt in the state, as the two prior examples. “Each time, ADOC has denied the obvious and claimed nothing went wrong. They say they’ve followed their protocol. One of these things must be true: Either they’re unreliable, or their protocol is unreliable. Neither one is acceptable when a person’s life is on the line.” Hamm died of cancer in 2021. Miller thus appears to be America’s only living execution survivor.

His family, too, survived something—as did the families of Miller’s victims, to whom Governor Kay Ivey extended her prayers early Friday morning, after Miller’s execution had been aborted. They most certainly deserve her sympathy, but Miller’s family say they haven’t heard from the Corrections Department or any other state agency about a debacle that could have, at the very least, been handled with some trace of decency. “Our family was treated like we were guilty by association instead of being there to support a family member in his likely last hours on earth,” Sandra wrote to me in an email. On the phone, she told me she felt worn out, like she’d been “rode hard and put up wet,” an evocative southernism for a horse worked up to a sweat under the saddle. I could hear her warm, familiar fortitude, and the exhaustion grinding it down. She is right about what she said—I saw it firsthand, how the prison guards shuffled them from location to location without explanation for cause or delay, and how they were left to wonder for about an hour whether Miller was alive.

Miller’s murders were unspeakably wrong—none of his kin dispute that, nor did I ever hear them utter a word to suggest that he ought not be penalized. But neither could I justify, in my review of events, what they had been made to go through that night, at the mock execution of their relative. They were as innocent as anyone, as innocent as you.

Before Doyle Hamm died, he never faced another execution date. Miller may or may not face another night in the execution chamber. If his litigation against the state is successful, it could provide greater detail about a corrections department that appears to be suffering several simultaneous crises, which could, in turn, help other prisoners facing execution in Alabama challenge their own gruesome fate.

The next man doesn’t have much time. On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court declared that in fewer than eight weeks, on November 17, Kenneth Eugene Smith will face his death at the hands of the state. He will presumably die, if Alabama gets its way, in the same chamber that last saw Alan Miller and Joe Nathan James. There is death, there are things worse than death, and, occasionally, there is salvation—and any of them could be in store for Smith.

This story is part of the Atlantic’s Inside America’s Death Chambers series supported by the Public Welfare Foundation

Why does Alabama keep botching executions?

The constitutional right whose protections lie nearest to the skin, flesh, and blood of each American citizen is the Eighth Amendment—the constraint on the government’s ability to punish us in cruel and unusual ways. As with any civil right, if it isn’t enforced, it effectively ceases to exist. Because its enforcement ultimately rests with the nation’s highest court, it is practically, if not ideally, a matter of politics. And though its disintegration may go unnoticed by those who, through good sense or good fortune, never encounter governmental punishment, its loss is felt acutely by those who do.

The Eighth Amendment’s destruction has now been felt this year by three men subjected to sequential execution proceedings in Alabama—one of whom died, two of whom survived. The state’s incompetence at executing its prisoners in accordance with its own protocol has degenerated into a civil-rights crisis, evident in the scattered slices and punctures of three executions gone awry in a row.

The latest of Alabama’s damned and misbegotten execution efforts unfolded last Thursday evening. I was scheduled to serve as a witness to the judicial killing of Kenneth Smith, a man I had met some months prior, when both of us began to suspect that he would, in all likelihood, soon be the subject of a mangled execution. There was little he could do to stop it, though his attorneys fought tirelessly against dismal odds to avert it, and his family prayed unceasingly for God to save him from what two other men had already endured.

What providence did hold for Smith was a severe and bracing mercy: After two days of back-and-forth among three of the nation’s courts concerning his Eighth Amendment rights and the potential of his impending execution to violate them, Smith was strapped down to a gurney for hours and tortured until his executioners simply gave up on killing him.

The Monday after Alabama attempted to kill Kenneth Smith, Governor Kay Ivey released a statement announcing a de facto moratorium on executions until “the Department of Corrections undertake[s] a top-to-bottom review of the state’s execution process” so that “the state can successfully deliver justice going forward.” In the view of the governor’s office, the ordered investigation, to be carried out by the very agency responsible for three consecutive disasters, is a regrettable but necessary step to guarantee that victims’ families are no longer promised executions the state cannot deliver. “For the sake of the victims and their families, we’ve got to get this right,” Ivey said in her press statement. That the Alabama Department of Corrections has repeatedly jeopardized, if not outright violated, the constitutional rights of some of her state’s own people seemed not to weigh heavily on her mind.

In 1988, Smith, then a 22-year-old father of four children, confessed to taking a murder-for-hire job from a 21-year-old friend of his named Billy Gray Williams, who had earlier been contracted for the murder by Charles Sennett, a pastor. The target of the plot was Sennett’s wife, 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett, whom he wanted killed in a mock robbery gone wrong so he could collect an insurance payment. Smith was joined by another friend, John Parker, in the scheme. Sennett was to pay both men $1,000 for their participation in his wife’s murder, on top of whatever they felt like stealing while ransacking the house.

When he admitted to the crime, Smith said that he had been an active participant in planning the hit and carrying out the robbery—a Samsung VCR stolen from Sennett’s home and discovered in Smith’s possession proved crucial in establishing his guilt—but denied that he himself had beaten or stabbed the pastor’s wife. Those acts he attributed to Parker, who, along with Smith and Williams, was promptly brought to trial on charges of capital murder.

The jurors considering the fates of Smith, Parker, and Williams had an immediate problem to confront: The mastermind of the plot to murder Elizabeth Sennett, the if not for cause of the slaying, was Charles Sennett—and he was, by the time of the legal proceedings, already dead by his own hand. He had committed suicide within one week of his wife’s murder, as soon as the investigation began to close in on him, orphaning their children and leaving prosecutors with the trio of men he had enlisted to perpetrate his crime.

Not all criminal sentencing is strictly about making the convicted person pay. Courts can order therapy or rehabilitation or other forms of pro-social and restorative programs built around reform and reintegration, with goals that surpass the merely punitive. But in capital sentencing, the entire premise and point is making the convicted person pay. The sentencing portion of a capital trial finds the law at its most theatrical, with prosecutors dramatizing the brutality, forethought, cruelty, and malice that seal men’s fates, and the defense providing by way of mitigation everything that provokes mercy in a soul: details of the defendant’s childhood, invariably terrible; an exploration of the man’s cognitive and emotional limits, in most cases considerable; a portrait gallery of loved ones and friends to frame a picture of a person who deserves to live. Whether the convicted person will be punished is not in question, only how, and it is the prosecution’s task to argue that the balance of justice cannot be restored unless he pays the ultimate price.

When the ringleader of a particularly heinous crime is already dead at the outset of a trial, the criminal-justice system cannot right the scales of justice. By the purported logic of the death penalty, the suicide of a culpable perpetrator ought to be proper enough restitution for the original homicide—the ultimate price is death, and the right person has paid it. But the emotional logic of crime and punishment requires not that someone pay but that someone be made to pay; not just that someone dies but that someone is killed. For Smith, Parker, and Williams, Sennett’s suicide was in that sense especially inopportune. They were the only ones left to be made to pay the ultimate price for Elizabeth Sennett’s murder.

For his role in the murder, a jury sentenced Billy Gray Williams to life without parole. By a vote of 10 to 2, another Alabama jury sentenced John Parker to life without parole as well—but his trial judge nullified that decision and sentenced Parker to death nonetheless, an old-fashioned outrage known as “judicial override.” Parker was executed in 2010.

Kenneth Smith was sentenced to death in 1989, but his sentence was overturned on appeal in 1992. Upon resentencing, a jury gave him life without parole by a vote of 11 to 1. A judge promptly overrode their decision, sentencing Smith to death again in 1996. In 2017 Alabama became the last state to ban the practice of judicial override, but the prohibition didn’t apply retroactively: Smith’s death sentence held.

Now, five years later, he was scheduled to die. If the state had learned from its acknowledged mistakes, it would have selected for its next execution a man whose sentencing didn’t come about through what is now understood to be a miscarriage of justice. Then again, if the state were in the habit of learning from its mistakes, it wouldn’t have sent anyone into its death chamber at all.

This past summer I picked up a call from Joel Zivot, a physician at Emory University Hospital and an expert on lethal injection. That call led me to Birmingham, Alabama. There, I observed the autopsy of Joe Nathan James Jr., a man killed by the Alabama Department of Corrections on July 28. James’s execution had been observably unusual per contemporaneous local media reports: It was delayed by three hours, and then it proceeded without many of the mainstays of judicial killings, including the apparent consciousness of the condemned or any last words.

Alabama was never able to confirm to media that James was conscious at the time of his execution, nor did it supply a convincing account of what had transpired during the long pause prior to James’s lethal injection. To protect executioners’ identity, their work occurs behind drawn curtains, unseen by attorneys for the condemned or by the press. Witnesses see only a man strapped down to a cross-shaped gurney, two catheters inserted into two veins, typically one in each arm. If the executioners succeed in laying those catheters and thus preparing the man for his death, then the only detailed account of what took place behind the curtains is their own.

An ADOC spokesperson said in an email to the media only that the execution team had struggled with “intravenous access” in James’s case and added that it has the right, per its own execution protocol, to set a central line—an intravenous catheter usually inserted in the neck, chest, or groin—if the team is incapable of establishing standard IV access. But, it said, that hadn’t happened.

What had happened is a story told by James’s body, which has become the subject of fierce legal debate. The body I saw that early-August afternoon in Birmingham had clearly been pierced several times by needles on the hands and arms, suggesting a process of trial and error. More troubling were a series of cuts on the left inner arm, near the elbow. Some were shallow and long; one was deep and short, perhaps cut with more conviction. None of them was explicable per ADOC’s execution protocol, which mentions nothing about whatever ghastly and bungled procedure this was—likely an attempted “cutdown” in search of a visible vein. (Alabama has denied performing a cutdown on James and has neglected to offer any other explanation of what happened to the man’s body in their custody.)

ADOC has since insisted that nothing particularly out of the ordinary occurred during James’s execution. Yet Alabama’s own Department of Forensic Sciences recently released an autopsy report that lists, under the subheading “Evidence of Injury,” the very cuts on his arm that, per protocol, had no business being there. James’s autopsy also found that the executioners had pierced his foot as well, echoing the attempted execution of Doyle Hamm, a man Alabama tried and failed to kill in 2018. After looking over the state’s autopsy report and my photographs of James’s body, James Gill, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner and a pathology professor at the Yale School of Medicine, told me in an email that “there are recent, parallel incised wounds (cuts) of the left forearm and antecubital fossa (crux of the elbow). The deepest one is next to a puncture site of the antecubital fossa (the crux of your elbow) … Directly under this area are the large veins of the arm … the antecubital wound is consistent with an attempt at a ‘cut-down’ to gain access to a vein.”

To date, nobody, including the state of Alabama, has produced a clear explanation for how the cuts on James’s arm got there, or who made them. In the absence of an alternative theory, a parsimonious guess would implicate the executioners. The inexpert and haphazard nature of the work was, for legal challenges that later cited James’s case, precisely the point. This wasn’t the meticulously plotted and diabolically perfected torture of a sadist, but the effortful failure of someone who was trying to achieve something somewhat beyond them. As a sinner looking over their endeavors, I identified; as a citizen, I was horrified.

The next execution effort did little to improve my impression. On September 22, ADOC attempted to execute Alan Miller, a man I met shortly after publishing my story about what had happened to James. My requests to serve as a media witness at recent executions had gone unanswered, so Miller asked me to serve as a personal witness, and I readily agreed, convinced that the authors of James’s execution were unlikely to pull off a flawless killing eight weeks later. With their identities still cloaked in secrecy, the executioners pierced Miller’s hands, arms, and foot with needles for somewhere around an hour, searching for veins under his skin with the aid of a cellphone flashlight and blindingly white fluorescent lights overhead before considering a site to puncture on his neck—when a tap came from the other side of an observation window, signaling that the execution had been called off. Someone (this person’s identity remains unknown) had evidently decided that the executioners were unlikely to succeed in getting a needle into Miller’s neck just moments before midnight, when his death warrant would expire. Miller, unlike James, had a lawyer present on prison grounds.

Miller’s attorneys were quick to chase his attempted execution with a series of complaints, one of which persuaded R. Austin Huffaker Jr., a federal judge in Alabama’s Middle District, to rule on November 15—two days before Kenneth Smith’s scheduled execution—that the Alabama Department of Corrections had to provide the names of its executioners to Miller’s attorneys one week hence. If the executioners could be known, then they could be deposed, and their answers under oath could shed some light on why Miller’s attempted execution had transpired the way it did.

And James’s execution, for that matter. This point—that the secrecy of the entire execution procedure, from personnel to practice, renders it nigh impossible to know what exactly keeps going wrong behind the curtain in Alabama’s executions—haunted the end of oral arguments in Smith’s appeal before the Eleventh Circuit. That hearing took place a mere 28 hours before Smith was to be executed. Almost no one knows who the executioners are, or why they can’t seem to kill people without inflicting needless suffering, or how they could be meaningfully sanctioned without being revealed in some way. A panel of three judges on the Eleventh Circuit took the evening before Smith’s scheduled execution to deliberate. The Supreme Court denied a separate petition that night.

Holman Correctional Facility is hidden among the dense marsh forests of lower Alabama, which are nourished by the Escambia River and its tributaries, among the many alluvial waterways that snake toward the Gulf of Mexico as the South fades into the ocean. After nightfall, the prison grounds can be forbiddingly dark, but not on the night Smith was to die.

Instead, Holman was lit by stadium-style floodlights brought in by corrections officials, creating an unusual and dramatic setting for what the state had sworn in court would be a by-the-book execution. Likewise, ADOC brought in patrol teams with canines to police the facility’s perimeter for the duration of the event, as though the greatest risk to seamless executions in Alabama weren’t already inside the death chamber, contemplating their tools.

I arrived at the Wind Creek casino, operated by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, which happens to be the nearest accommodation to the prison, before dusk and joined Robert Grass, one of Smith’s attorneys, all of whom were in the midst of managing their client’s last appeals. Capital defense attorneys, a wry and ironical breed, refer to the final legal maneuvers prior to a client’s execution as “end-stage capital litigation,” a clinically precise term for a chaotic period in which time both shrinks and dilates, and cases that have idled in courts for years rocket through hearings and rulings at warp speed. Inevitably, a sense of momentum begins to build. As the writer Janet Malcolm once observed, legal papers written in one’s favor are among the most affirming and optimistic documents a person is likely to read in a lifetime, and one could be forgiven, as such papers are passed up to the highest courts of the land, for believing in their promise.

There is time inside that hope, and it spreads open into an intense, immediate present. Smith’s mother, sister, sons, daughter-in-law, and wife, Dee, gathered at another nearby hotel, keeping in close contact with me via cellphone. Although the state liaises with the families of the victims in a capital case, no such provisions are made for the perpetrator’s family, whose only offense is being related to the offender. They’re left alone to patch together news from media reports and the sporadic updates of understandably preoccupied defense attorneys. It is a tense and nerve-racking process that the state makes worse through its resolute indifference, as though the torture of a prisoner’s family were part and parcel of a proper execution. Loved ones wait, and do as they are told. Any text, tweet, or telephone call could mean news of life or death. Adrenaline rises early and remains high.

In those hours, reversals can arrive suddenly. As Grass and I waited in a hotel room, Smith was denied a stay in district court. Smith’s attorneys immediately appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, which had ruled in his favor earlier that day and sent the case back to the district court. At 7:44, despite the fact that Smith’s appeal was pending, the state notified Smith’s attorneys that it was “preparing Mr. Smith for execution,” meaning—as far as we could tell—that it intended to begin attempting access to Smith’s veins, though the poison, we assumed, would not flow until the courts had made their final rulings. Somewhere near 8 o’clock, guards removed Smith from his cell and transported him to the execution chamber, where he was strapped down to the gurney.

I knew what to expect next: a phone call from the secretary of the warden of Holman, who would tell me and Grass to head to the front of the casino, where we would be picked up in an ADOC van and taken to prison grounds, walked through a metal detector, marched into a witness room, and shown an execution. I called Dee about the district court’s denial of Smith’s stay, to make sure she was informed and to ask if she was ready for the next steps. She was straining to maintain her composure against the worsening circumstances. She had been visiting frequently with Smith for the past several days, during the extended visitation hours permitted the week of a prisoner’s execution, and communicating with him via telephone for the past several hours. But then their communication had abruptly stopped. And the next call to come would be—

—a stay from the Eleventh Circuit, which, when announced to Dee and Smith’s mother and children on the other end of the line, elicited shouts and clapping and cries of joy; he could make it now, it seemed, as the clock ticked closer to midnight, and the expiration of Smith’s death warrant. In the hotel room with Grass, emotions were subtler: Though Smith had prevailed in the Eleventh Circuit by convincing the judges that, based on Alabama’s recent history, his lethal injection would present an unconstitutional risk to his Eighth Amendment rights, I strongly suspected that once the case reached the Supreme Court later that night, the six conservative justices would not be so moved. The Court has never in its history outlawed a method of execution. Indeed, in recent years it has issued rulings in Eighth Amendment capital-punishment cases that have raised the bar for receiving mercy progressively higher.

A little before 10:20 that night, the Court vacated Smith’s stay without explanation. (The Court’s three liberal justices dissented.) Now, again, we waited in silence for the call from the prison that would lead us outside to wait for the van that would transport us to Smith’s end. Now, again, all the despair and despondency came. Every trilling slot machine and dinging elevator bell echoed through the casino walls as we waited for the telephone to ring. We said nothing.

Time passed. The boxy digital clock on the hotel nightstand flashed 10:30, 10:36, 10:45. I wondered if the prison had deliberately neglected to contact us. Dee hadn’t heard anything either; she just waited, shattered. Eleven o’clock arrived. I looked at Grass and realized that Alabama was botching another execution.

By that time, Smith told me and Dee in a phone call later that night, he had been strapped to a gurney in Holman’s execution chamber for more than three hours, since 8 o’clock, after his request for a stay had been denied in district court. Although Alabama’s executioners didn’t begin trying to access his veins then, neither did anyone from Holman or the state of Alabama bother to tell Smith about the stay that the Eleventh Circuit instated sometime after the district court’s decision—he simply remained strapped to the gurney intended to be his deathbed, bound and uncertain, as the evening sloped toward midnight. The executioners turned their attention to him only after 10 o’clock, when the Supreme Court vacated the stay, extending them its written invitation.

At that point, Smith recalled, three men entered the chamber and busily set about forcing needles into his flesh, to place their catheters. They were successful once, Smith said, in his left arm. And then, evoking the ordeals of James and Miller, site by site, the men began to fail: piercing Smith’s right hand once, twice, three times; working the needle in and tugging it out, trying a different angle two, three, four times; then moving on to his feet, surveying there, having no success; then switching to his right arm to repeat the process begun on his left. When Smith’s other veins were spent, one of the men moved toward his neck.

Now, Smith told us, one of the executioners donned a clear face mask and threw a surgical covering with a transparent plastic opening over Smith. He asked Smith to turn his head. Smith refused, and a deputy warden from another correctional facility clasped his head and twisted it to the side. Then the executioner pushed a large-gauge surgical needle into Smith’s chest, just beneath his collarbone, searching blindly for his subclavian vein to establish a central line.

Smith could feel the needle stabbing him “like a knife,” and he protested the pain, which the executioners insisted he should not be able to feel, because they had already injected an anesthetic. Whatever they had given him, it did little for the pain and nothing to get them closer to a vein.

“And I kept telling them,” Smith told me and Dee, “call the fucking judge. My case number is 2:22-CV-497. Somebody in this fucking room call the judge or call my lawyer.” (Nobody at ADOC responded to a request for comment about the events of that evening.)

But nobody said a word. Not to Smith, when he was objecting to the acts that would later form the substance of his reinstated legal complaint against the state of Alabama, and not to Smith’s family or his attorneys when state officials decided, sometime around 11:20 p.m., that there was no more point in trying to access Smith’s veins before midnight. Instead, we surmised that Smith had survived his execution from reporters gathered at Holman to serve as press witnesses, who began tweeting that they were being removed from idling prison vans outside the execution chamber and taken back inside the media center.

At midnight, when Smith’s death warrant finally expired, Governor Kay Ivey published a statement expressing her regrets that the state had been unable to kill Smith and her confidence that “attempting it was the right thing to do.” She offered her prayers to Elizabeth Sennett’s children and grandchildren, who, she said, were being “forced to relive their tragic loss,” though she neglected to specify by whom.

The state of Alabama seemed to contend that Smith had foiled his own execution through cynical last-minute legal trickery, at the expense of honest justice. But every prisoner on death row is entitled to such end-stage legal appeals, and every capital defense attorney goes into the hours before an execution prepared to protect their client’s interests to the best of their abilities. None of that was unusual, nor did the time constraints imposed by the legal proceedings actually represent a significant barrier to getting a needle into a second vein: Lateness of the hour aside, executioners still pierced and injected Smith for more than an hour, and called off their efforts with more than 30 minutes left on the clock.

What happened to Smith appears quite similar to what seems to have happened to Joe Nathan James, and what certainly did happen to Alan Miller: For reasons that remain unclear due to the anonymity of the executioners and the secrecy surrounding their qualifications, training, and activities inside the death chamber, the IV team tasked with accessing Smith’s veins once again failed after many attempts. Its efforts this time did not include a cutdown, but culminated with their protocol’s most extreme contingency, a central-line procedure. Such an outcome was what Smith’s own final appeals had predicted; the prisoner himself proved a more accurate assessor of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ capacities than the agency and its lawyers. Then again, the people subject to the capital-punishment regimes of execution states have more cause than anyone to carefully study their captors.

Smith, like Miller, is litigating his botched, aborted execution. He is also recovering from a surreal and terrifying experience that, whatever one makes of it, was not part of his sentence, and indicates both Alabama’s stunning incapacity to perform executions that comport with the Constitution and the state’s bold indifference to any requirement to do so. There is no official involved with Alabama’s capital-punishment edifice who does not realize that the state’s executions and executioners have a serious problem.

Alabama’s failures in the execution chamber are extreme, but not unique. The week Kenneth Smith was to be killed, three other men were executed via lethal injection in the United States: Stephen Barbee, in Texas; Richard Fairchild, in Oklahoma; and Murray Hooper, in Arizona. The IV team in Hooper’s case struggled with venous access and wound up inserting a catheter into his femoral artery; likewise, in Barbee’s case, executioners failed to properly insert needles into the man’s veins for half an hour before setting a central line in his neck.

One can blame the right of the condemned to defend themselves in this nation’s courts, or one can blame them for their unwillingness to die. But the most proximate cause of America’s cruel-and-unusual-punishment problem is the fact that this country still countenances judicial killings, which, while carried out in the name of the American people, dissolve our rights little by little.

This story is part of the Atlantic’s Inside America’s Death Chambers series supported by the Public Welfare Foundation.