Lawyers for an Alabama death row inmate, who survived a botched execution in November after more than three hours, said a second attempt "will fare no better than the first."
Kenneth Smith was prepared to die for his role in a murder-for-hire plot, but the IV with the lethal concoction was improperly injected into his veins, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.
The execution attempt went on for hours until the warrant ended on midnight, according to the legal action, and lawyers argued that Smith "will fare no better" during a second execution attempt.
"Mr. Smith’s own failed execution puts him 'in a rare position of having proof that an execution by lethal injection caused him severe pain,' supporting a plausible inference that he faces an objectively intolerable risk that the same thing will happen if ADOC (Alabama Department of Corrections) is permitted to try to execute him by lethal injection again," his lawyers wrote.
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Lawyers asked the court to remove Smith from death row.
Smith's botched execution in November 2022 was the second failed execution attempt in two months in Alabama, and followed a July 2022 lethal injection that was nearly flubbed the same way but was ultimately completed after hours of struggling to establish an IV line.
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There was a temporary moratorium on state executions during an interview review spearheaded by the state's Department of Corrections, which Gov. Kay Ivey lifted on Feb. 24, which was four days before Smith's most recent court filing.
Ivey said it was "time to resume our duty of carrying out lawful death sentences" following a "top-to-bottom review" In a letter to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall.
Smith was one of two men who were each paid $1,000 to kill Elizabeth Sennett on behalf of her husband, who was in debt and wanted to collect on insurance.
Sennett was found dead on March 18, 1988, in the couple’s home on Coon Dog Cemetery Road in Alabama's Colbert County.
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The coroner testified that the 45-year-old woman had been stabbed eight times in the chest and once on each side of the neck.
Her husband, Charles Sennett Sr., who was the pastor of the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield, killed himself a week after his wife's death when investigators closed in on him as a suspect, according to court documents.
John Forrest Parker, the other man convicted in the slaying, was executed in 2010.
