Alabama put a man to death on Thursday.

Eyewitnesses in Atmore saw him convulse and gasp for air in his last minutes on Earth.

And I have a question.

Do you feel safer?

I’m not asking about Kenneth Eugene Smith’s guilt in the 1988 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett. If he weren’t executed last week, he would have spent his life behind bars with an infinitesimal chance of ever coming out.

But will his torturous last moments cut Alabama’s homicide death rate, the third-highest in the nation?

The 72 executions that came before didn’t.

So what’s left?

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall says it’s justice.

“Despite the international effort by activists to undermine and disparage our state’s justice system and to deny justice to the victims of heinous murders, our proven method offers a blueprint for other states and a warning to those who would contemplate shedding innocent blood,” he said in a statement after Smith’s execution. “This is an important night for Liz Sennett’s family, for justice, and for the rule of law in our great nation.

This is a theme for Marshall. When the state executed Casey McWhorter in November for the murder of Edward Lee Williams, the AG attacked “advocates” who, he claimed, refused to discuss the fact that Williams had been shot 11 times or “the agony that his family has suffered since that terrible day.”

Murder leaves psychic wounds in families that can last decades, or generations. Those victims should have free, lifetime access to counseling and a speedy resolution of their claims at the Alabama Crime Victims Compensation Commission.

And Marshall almost certainly understands that death penalty convictions drag out a family’s agony with multiple rounds of appeals. The process for life sentences is shorter.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that a death for a death is just.

What does justice look like in Alabama’s execution chamber?

When Smith was first convicted of Sennett’s murder, Alabama executed people in the electric chair. It left John Louis Evans III with charred and smoking skin. Two jolts of electricity were required to kill Horace Dunkins, a man with intellectual disabilities.

The state switched to lethal injection in 2002. Ronald Bert Smith coughed and heaved for 13 minutes during his execution in 2016.

Doyle Hamm, an death row inmate with terminal cancer, was brought to the death chamber in 2018 and punctured 11 times in the legs and groin until he began bleeding out on a gurney. (After that, the state of Alabama, suddenly aware that a dying man poses no danger, allowed cancer to take its course.)

Joe Nathan James, Jr.’s execution in 2022, opposed by the family of Faith Hall, his victim, dragged out for hours. According to one autopsy, it left him with multiple punctures wounds and deep incisions on his skin.

This may repulse you. But wise men like Neil Gorsuch have assured us that pain is largely irrelevant in executions. In the eyes of the nation’s judiciary, everything Alabama has done in the execution chamber in the last 40 years — in your name — is fine.

So your leaders continue the death march. And they want it to go faster.

Alabama doesn’t guarantee attorneys for a major part of the death penalty appeals process.

The year after Ronald Bert Smith’s death, the Legislature pushed through a bill that made it much harder for those sentenced to death to have their convictions reviewed.

Amid mounting questions over the use of lethal injection, the Legislature in 2018 created nitrogen executions, a method that (until Thursday) had never been used on a person, and that veterinarians discourage when euthanizing animals.

When the state botched three straight executions in 2022, Gov. Kay Ivey announced (despite Marshall’s opposition) a moratorium on executions.

It lasted all of four months, and if you didn’t notice it, that’s understandable. The gaps between regularly scheduled executions have been longer.

The moratorium led state officials to conclude (in a process never made public) that the problem wasn’t the state inflicting long and drawn-out deaths on human beings.

As Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm wrote to Ivey, the issue was that condemned inmates “will continue seeking to evade their lawfully-imposed death sentences.” In other words, these people have constitutional rights and want to exercise them.  The solution, as they saw it, was to extend the window when executions take place.

Despite the incompetence.

Despite the instances of questionable convictions.

Despite the ghastly scenes, repeated over and over again, at Holman Correctional Facility.

Out of pride; stubbornness or a simple faith in the cleansing power of death, your leaders send people to the gurney.

They tear through legal and ethical restraints on this terrible power.

The people sworn to uphold law and order in Alabama appear ready to allow anything to happen to a person in an execution chamber, so long as it ends their existence. They see human beings burned, choked and bled, and call it justice.

Our judiciary nods indulgently at this mob mentality and allows our criminal justice system, and those in it, to be brutalized more every year.

And I have a question.

Do you feel safer?

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.