Execution of African American on borrowed sentence after Supreme Court ruling

An African-American sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman 30 years ago and scheduled for execution this Thursday in Alabama has been granted a last-minute stay, the United States Supreme Court ruling that the he absence of a chaplain in the death chamber was illegal.

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Willie Smith, 52, was to receive a lethal injection Thursday evening February 11 in Holman Penitentiary in Atmore, and would have become the first death row inmate executed in Alabama since the outbreak of Covid-19.

In 1991, Willie Smith abducted a 22-year-old woman in front of a distributor.

By threatening her with a gun, he had forced her to give him her bank card number and made a withdrawal of a hundred dollars.

He then drove to a cemetery and shot his victim, who was the sister of a policeman, to the head.

He had put the body back in the young woman's car and set it on fire.

A year later, he was sentenced to death by ten out of twelve jurors, Alabama being one of the few states in the United States to allow verdicts by non-unanimous juries.

Over the following decades, his lawyers challenged the decision, notably by pointing out the intellectual disabilities of their client, without succeeding in having his sentence commuted.

As the execution date approached, they introduced new appeals, in particular to contest the absence of a chaplain in the death chamber or the changes to the protocol adopted by the prison authorities because of the Covid-19.

Willie Smith had indeed asked that his pastor be at his side during his execution, to facilitate what he called the "

".

A federal appeals court ruled in their favor late Wednesday, but authorities in Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court.

The latter dismissed the appeal in a decision late Thursday, with the majority of judges ruling that Alabama "

."

Contrary to the states, which have not carried out any executions since July, Donald Trump's administration resumed federal executions during the summer and carried out 13 executions in seven months, including three in January 2021. L The arrival of Democrat Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, has put an end to this unprecedented series.