Michael DeWayne Smith, 41, was executed on the morning of Thursday, April 4, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was convicted and sentenced to death for two counts of murder in February 2002, of Janet Moore, 41, and Sharath Pullell, 22. He spent more than 20 years on death row.
Michael DeWayne Smith [AP Photo/Oklahoma Department of Corrections]
Smith was the first person executed in Oklahoma this year and the 12th person executed since the state resumed executions in 2021 after a nearly seven-year hiatus following a series of horrific so-called botched executions. The Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Smith’s request for clemency last month, and the U.S. Supreme Court also rejected his last-minute appeal.
Smith was executed by lethal injection of a three-drug mixture: the sedative midazolam, the paralytic vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride to induce cardiac arrest. When asked for his final words, he simply said, “No, I’m OK,” according to the Associated Press.
According to the Associated Press, Smith appeared to tremble briefly after the first dose and try to lift his head from the gurney, “and then took several short, gasping breaths that sounded like snoring. Oklahoma Department of Corrections Commissioner Stephen Harp said after the execution that Smith ‘appeared to have had some form of sleep apnea.'”
A doctor entered the execution chamber at 10:14 a.m., shook Smith, and pronounced him unconscious. Smith appeared to stop breathing about a minute later and was pronounced dead by prison officials at 10:20 a.m. after the doctor pronounced him dead.
Smith maintained his innocence at his pardon hearing last month, apologizing to the victims’ families but insisting in a tearful 15-minute speech that “I didn’t commit these crimes. I didn’t kill people. I was high on drugs. I don’t even remember being arrested.”
Smith’s lawyer, Mark Henriksen, argued that the death sentence should be commuted to life in prison because Smith was in a PCP stupor when he confessed to police, and that his client’s IQ score indicated he was intellectually disabled, a disability exacerbated by years of drug abuse.
Smith’s family also maintained his innocence and filed a petition with Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office the day before his execution, urging him to halt the execution based on new evidence that witnesses had been coerced during Smith’s trial. The Republican governor was unimpressed.
Prosecutors have previously said Smith was a gang member who killed his victims out of revenge: He killed Moore because he believed her son had identified himself to police, and he killed Pullell because he thought the convenience store clerk had disrespected the gang, prosecutors said.
The Rev. Don Heath, chairman of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said in a statement: “Michael Smith was a troubled and vulnerable young man with an intellectual disability. He was encouraged by his advisors to plead innocent rather than plead guilty, but in doing so lost the chance of receiving a pardon. He needed mercy and forgiveness and he got neither.”
Smith’s mental health adviser, Jeff Hood, wrote on March 1 that, based on numerous psychological evaluations, Smith’s intellectual disability makes him unfit for the death penalty. Hood cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which found that executing a death row inmate with a severe mental disability violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) scores are estimates of intelligence based on standardized tests and are widely considered abstract and inaccurate. Recent IQ test results show that roughly two-thirds of the population falls into the category of scores between 85 and 115, with roughly 2% falling above 130 and below 70. Smith’s IQ scores were reportedly between 76 and 79, but the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA) argued that he did not meet the state’s criteria for intellectual disability. The court also denied an emergency stay of Smith’s execution based on the argument that untested forensic evidence could weaken his conviction.
Darin Pickens, an Oklahoma death row inmate who has an IQ similar to Smith’s and was granted a sentence reduction by the OCCA in 2005 under Atkins, illustrates the arbitrariness of these assessments in determining death penalty eligibility – a nonscientific scale used by state officials to determine whether a man or woman should live or die based on their intellectual capacity.
The death penalty is carried out overwhelmingly against working people, the poor, and the downtrodden, a reality acknowledged by the U.S. justice system but totally rejected as a reason to end this barbaric practice.
In 2016, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that death row inmate Smith
The court submitted affidavits from family members detailing details of Smith’s childhood, including that his father and other family members inflicted severe physical punishment and abuse on him, that his father was an alcoholic and violent towards his mother until his parents divorced when Smith was about two years old, that Smith’s brothers introduced him to drugs and gangs at an early age, that Smith was born with a swollen head, was delivered by forceps and suffered other head injuries during his childhood, and that Smith was sexually abused by an older woman when he was seven or eight years old.
Oklahoma courts have shown contempt not only for the 121 men and three women who have been put to death since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Their hostility has also been directed toward the prison’s execution teams (most of whom, honorably, are volunteers) who administer the lethal drugs, and the state officials who oversee the lethal injections.
In 2021, OCCA scheduled an unprecedented 25 executions within three years, aiming to reduce the state’s death row by 58 percent. Just days before Smith’s execution, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked the court to allow 90 days between scheduled executions to “address trauma and resource shortages and ensure that our state does not experience another botched execution.”
During a hearing to consider Drummond’s request, OCCA Judge Gary Lumpkin told officers tasked with carrying out executions that they had to “be patient” and “be men.” He told the attorney general that he did not believe in “sympathy.”
“We set a reasonable time to start this, but you all keep pushing it,” Judge Lumpkin added. “Who’s to say you’re going to come in next month and say we need 120 days? This has got to stop. People need to be patient and realize they have a hard job to do and get it done in a timely and proficient manner.”
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