Man put to death for 1991 killing of woman
ATMORE, Ala. — An Alabama man who avoided execution in February was put to death Thursday for the 1991 killing of a woman who was abducted during a robbery and then shot in a cemetery.
Willie B. Smith III, 52, received a lethal injection at a prison in southwest Alabama. He was pronounced dead at 9:47 p.m. local time.
The execution went forward after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay by his lawyers, who had argued the execution should be blocked on grounds that Smith had an intellectual disability meriting further scrutiny by the courts.
Smith was convicted of kidnapping and murdering 22-yearold Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham.
Prosecutors said Smith had a shotgun when he abducted Johnson in October 1991 from an ATM location in the Birmingham area. He withdrew money using her bank card and then took her to a cemetery and shot her in the back of the head, they said. Johnson was the sister of a Birmingham police officer.
“After waiting for 30 years, justice has been served,” Johnson’s family said in a statement read by Alabama Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn. The execution began shortly after 9:30 p.m. Smith declined to give any final words. The state allowed a personal pastor with the inmate for the first time during the execution. Pastor Robert Wiley appeared to pray with Smith and put his hand on his leg as the lethal injection procedure began. One of his attorneys held his fist up to the witness room glass in an apparent sign of support.
The court had halted an earlier execution date for Smith in February when he was already in a holding cell near the death chamber and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with his appeal that he could not be put to death without his pastor present.
Smith appeared to quickly jerk twice upward on the gurney as the first drugs hit his system. “That’s the midazolam,” one of his attorneys said in reference to the sedative, used at the start of executions, that has been the subject of litigation. His breathing was initially labored, but then slowed and stopped.
Dunn said the execution went “according to our protocol.”