Convicted Kidnapper-Murderer To Be Executed In Alabama Next Month

Alabama has scheduled a 51-year-old convict to be executed next month after his lethal injection was called off earlier this year when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the inmate's request to have his personal pastor by his side in the death chamber. ​

The Alabama Supreme Court set an Oct. 21 execution date for Willie B. Smith III, the Associated Press reported.

Smith was originally scheduled to undergo death via lethal injection on Feb. 11, but the federal high court postponed the execution after the justices maintained an injunction issued by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said he could not be killed without his pastor present in the execution room.

Alabama, which maintained that non-prison staff should not be in the chamber for security reasons, amended its lethal injection procedures to allow the request.

"Alabama has not carried its burden of showing that the exclusion of all clergy members from the execution chamber is necessary to ensure prison security. So the State cannot now execute Smith without his pastor present, to ease what Smith calls the ‘transition between the worlds of the living and the dead," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by three other justices.

Smith, who is now set to be the first person to be executed in Alabama this year, was convicted for the murder of 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in 1991.

Prosecutors claimed Smith abducted the victim at gunpoint from an ATM, stole $80 from her and then shot her in the back of the head in a cemetery.

Smith would have been the first inmate to be executed by a state this year had the February lethal injection followed through. That distinction was later taken by 41-year-old Quintin Phillippe Jones, who was executed via lethal injection in Texas on May 19 after he was convicted of beating his 83-year-old great aunt in September 1999.

Prior to that, Texas also saw the last state execution since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which took place on July 8 last year with the lethal injection of 45-year-old murderer Billy Joe Wardlow.

A similar case to Smith's occurred in Texas in early 2019 when a death row inmate's execution was halted because prison officials would not let his Buddhist spiritual adviser be present in the execution chamber.