By Anne Dobbing, Pax Christi Scotland Member
On Thursday 25th January 2024, in Alabama USA Kenneth Smith, aged 58, was executed by being forced to breathe pure nitrogen gas through a face mask. The procedure took 22 minutes, and he writhed and convulsed and pulled at the gurney restraints as he gasped for air.
Reading about this dreadful event reminds me of a death that I witnessed on February 15th, 2006, when my husband Peter and I were present at the execution of another Mr Smith – our dear friend, Clyde Smith, who we had been writing to and visiting for several years, who was imprisoned on Death Row in the Polunsky Unit, Livingston, Texas. Let me tell you a bit about him and what happened.
Clyde was born in North Carolina and came from a violent and abusive family. He ran away from home at the age of 15 and in his own words had been an angry child and teenager who suffered violent beatings by his mother and by the five men who cohabited with her.
I wrote to him about the children I taught at school who needed extra help and he wrote back,
“I was one of those kids who needed extra help, but in the end I still failed. Reading was not only my favourite subject, but it was the only thing that came natural to me. Math, History, Science…forget about it. I was perhaps the most stubborn person when it came to having patience. If I could not understand something ‘right now’ I’d fast give up. Today I have a general sense of pretty much everything, because after I quit school, I had the need to educate myself. Perhaps I still would not pass any exams today, but I’m content with the things I’ve learned; and because I often see or hear things that interest me, the learning never stops…”
Clyde went to Texas to try to find his father when he was 18 and his father threw him out. Soon after that Clyde was involved in the crime that he was sentenced to death for committing, though he always maintained that he didn’t murder anyone. But he was an angry young man. This is the ‘mug shot’ that was taken after his arrest.
He was on death row for 13 years and during that time he read and drew and wrote letters to people whom he contacted through the Human Writes group, which arranges pen pals for prisoners on death row.
First of all my husband Peter wrote to Clyde for nearly two years. Then as Peter told me more and more about his pen pal I began to write as well. Then my elderly mother, Rose, who was always sympathetic to young men in difficult situations, also started to write to Clyde.
We regularly received letters from him, and he said very little of the prison where he was but was greatly interested in our lives and what we were doing. Sometimes he mentioned ‘lockdowns’, and ‘shakedowns’, or the permanent air conditioning even in winter, but he said we were his ‘window on the world’ and he wanted to know what was happening outside, so we set up an account for him to receive copies of USA Today. We sent him books as well as letters and we listened with interest to his – very honest and forthright – comments about what he read.
Peter visited him altogether five times over the years when we were writing; and he took our then 16-year-old daughter to Polunsky on one of his trips because she wanted to meet Clyde as well. I visited Texas twice.
He became so much more than the angry young man of his teenage years. He drew beautiful pictures – from memory and imagination. When he received his final execution date in December 2005, he worked hard to complete three beautiful large pictures for us before the date he knew he would die in February. This is one of them.
Writing to my 91-year-old mother, he said:
“You wrote that you love water, and for all of life it’s very important. I’m drawing this dream-like image (water is the most difficult thing for me to draw), I wanted you to see one of my pleasant thoughts. You mentioned water, so I tried to imagine it. My imagination is the most complete thing that I have; something that no matter the circumstances, can never be taken away from me.”
Peter and I flew to Texas when the last of his appeals failed and we visited him in the Polunsky Unit the day before he was executed. I asked a prison warden if we could just hold his hand to comfort him, but she said ‘NO!’ very emphatically.
On the day of his execution, we drove across Lake Livingston to the Huntsville Unit where executions were carried out. Over the road from the prison there is a cafe advertising such things as ‘Death Row Burgers’. We were admitted to the prison and questioned about the water bottle that one of us carried in. “Was this purchased inside the prison or before you entered?” Walking to the execution suite, we were warned about tripping on uneven paving in the courtyard. The banality of the words was shocking to me. I felt that the execution process dehumanised the staff administering it. In the waiting room adjacent to the execution chamber a guard asked us if we were “paid to come”.
We entered the viewing booth with its glass screen wall overlooking the execution room, where Clyde was already strapped onto a metal gurney with intravenous lines installed. He looked up at us and said, “I want to thank you all for being here and for your love and support. I love you all.”
The execution time was short in comparison with that of Mr Kenneth Smith who died from Nitrogen hypoxia. Clyde died six minutes after the lethal injection was administered and Peter and I slowly made our way to the exit of the prison, where the governor dismissed us with a cheery ‘Have a nice day!” Peter was weeping and I felt I had aged by 10 years. Outside the prison there was yet another shock as Clyde’s estranged mother and sister were waiting, having been refused entrance to the prison because they were not listed on his official witness documentation.
Peter, who called Clyde his brother, took responsibility for collecting Clyde’s ashes and we distributed them to the other friends who had supported him, who also lived in Europe. We then spread the last of his ashes in the sea off the coast of Dorset, where we lived and where he often wrote about in his letters.
