Alabama Shrouds Executioners in Secrecy
"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” remarked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1913. Given the effort put into execution secrecy by Alabama’s Department of Corrections (DOC), its death chamber needs a good deal of exposure.
On September 26, 2024, the state carried out the killing of prisoner Alan Eugene Miller, 59, by nitrogen hypoxia—the agreed-upon method after botching his last execution attempt—with scant evidence that it was ready. Nitrogen hypoxia had been used only once before in Alabama, when it made for a brutal execution of prisoner Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, in January 2024, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.50; and Mar. 2024, p.24.]
Witness Lauren Gill reported that “Miller visibly struggled for roughly two minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints,” before he “then spent the next 5-6 minutes intermittently gasping for air.” DOC Commissioner John Q. Hamm replied with gaslighting that what Gill saw were only “involuntary body movements,” adding that “[e]verything went according to plan and according to our protocol.”
But that protocol also put a spotlight on guards who staff the execution team; beyond simply strapping a condemned prisoner to a gurney for lethal injection, they are tasked with technical responsibilities during nitrogen hypoxia, like monitoring oxygen levels and putting equipment together. Again, DOC has tried to keep details secret, though some members of the execution team were identified by witnesses to Smith’s killing.
The team’s leader, Cpt. Brandon McKenzie, was accused in a 2020 lawsuit of violently attacking Holman Correctional Facility prisoner Lawrence Phillips, who was subsequently treated for a brain bleed and needed stitches, staples and a neck brace. DOC also kept resolution of that case in the dark with an undocketed August 2023 settlement. See: Phillips v. McKenzie, USDC (S.D. Ala.), Case No. 1:20-cv-00270. The agency then promoted McKenzie in October 2023; he reportedly earned $135,600 that year—over twice the state’s median household income, which the U.S. Census Bureau estimated at $62,212.
Another execution team member, Christopher Earl, was demoted from lieutenant after Holman prisoner Jamal Jackson, 29, fatally hanged himself in May 2020. Earl found him but sent a nurse away and left Jackson hanging another 12 minutes before the nurse was summoned back and the prisoner was finally cut down. The guard left work before the body was picked up, another policy violation. DOC’s then-Commissioner Jefferson Dunn sanctioned Earl for “disgraceful” conduct, but the guard kept his job. The following year he left three other prisoners sweltering in outdoor cages for three hours, earning a three-day suspension by Dunn. The guard earned $127,000 in 2023.
A fellow execution team member, Lt. Brian Finch, also got a three-day suspension in May 2021, after DOC learned that he failed to report pleading no contest to third-degree battery on a law enforcement officer during a drunken November 2019 incident in Florida. Finch drove back to both states—Florida and inebriation—in January 2024, earning a one-year probated sentence and a six-month drivers license suspension. He earned $104,000 in 2023.
Justice Brandeis would disapprove of Alabama’s efforts to keep these details under wraps. The jurist decried “the wickedness of people shielding wrongdoers & passing them off (or at least allowing them to pass themselves off) as honest men.”
Additional sources: Alabama Political Reporter, Bolts Magazine