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schifferbrains

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I heard on NPR this guy had already survived an execution attempt by the state of Alabama. looking it up...

"This is the second time Alabama has attempted to put Smith to death. In 2022, workers tried and failed to place the intravenous line necessary to kill him with lethal injection drugs. After he was strapped to the gurney for four hours, the execution was called off."

Alabama has repeatedly struggled to carry out executions without mistakes. In July 2022, the execution team took hours to set the intravenous lines for prisoner Joe Nathan James. James was ultimately executed, but his family has sued the state for what is believed to be one of the longest executions in U.S. history. Just two months after that, the state was forced to halt the execution of prisoner Alan Miller for the same reason. In November, workers struggled again to find a vein to inject Smith.

Smith's path to the death chamber has not been straightforward. After he was brought to trial in 1989, 10 of 12 jury members voted that he should receive the death penalty. But that conviction was later reversed when it was revealed that prosecutors had unconstitutionally struck Black jurors from the pool. Black people have historically been less supportive of capital punishment than white Americans.

When Smith was retried in 1996, all but one juror voted against the death penalty and recommended he spend life in prison instead. But the trial judge, Pride Tompkins, overruled the jury and imposed a death sentence. The Alabama statute that allowed judges to override jury recommendations has since been replaced; Smith would have been sentenced to life in prison had 11 of 12 jurors voted as they did during his second trial.

thehill.com

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday took aim at former President Trump for pushing Republican lawmakers to oppose a border deal so that he could use the issue to campaign against President Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
Romney told CNN's Manu Raju he thought it was "really appalling" that Trump would try to prevent progress on addressing the surge in migration at the southern border.

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