Execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith brings mixed emotions | GARY COSBY JR.
The state of Alabama put to death Kenneth Eugene Smith by the untested nitrogen hypoxia asphyxiation method on Jan. 25. Smith was convicted of the murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett in 1988.
I knew Liz and her husband, Charles. He was the pastor at the Church of Christ in the little town where I grew up. They were friends with my parents and my father was also a pastor in that town. Charles and I served briefly together in the volunteer fire department.
Charles hired three men to murder his wife. I had already left the town and gone to grad school in Virginia by that time. Nevertheless, it was a shock to hear of her murder, then a greater shock to hear that Charles had been behind it. There was an affair with another woman — I knew her, too. She used to shop in the little grocery store where I worked as a teenager. She was not implicated in the murder. News stories indicate there was a financial problem and Charles hoped to collect the life insurance money to pay his debts.
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My father, who was the town volunteer fire chief and an emergency medical technician, responded to the call to the Sennett home. Liz was still clinging to life when he and the other EMTs arrived. She would die a couple hours later from multiple stab wounds and a brutal beating.
To remember what a sweet woman Liz Sennett was and to know how she was brutalized just turns my stomach. I wondered why Charles, if he was so caught up with the other woman, didn’t divorce his wife and just run off with her. I don’t suppose there is any accounting for what a person will do, even those who are supposed to be the most upright, especially when money and sex are involved.
Three men were convicted. Billy Gray Williams died in prison while serving a life sentence for the crime. John Forrest Parker has already been executed for his role in Liz Sennett's beating death. Alabama botched the first attempt at executing Smith when they failed to properly do the intravenous lines used in lethal injection. Multiple appeals failed to stop the second execution attempt.
Smith’s execution by use of nitrogen gas left many disturbed by the methodology. I get that. Doing something like gassing a person has disturbing historical precedents that we don’t wish to revisit. In the end, regardless of the method, dead is dead and Smith is now dead, paying the price for the crime he committed.
There was a great deal of hand-wringing over this execution with multiple human rights groups protesting it. While I understand all that, Liz Sennett received no mercy from him; therefore, I feel little sympathy for her murderers.
I don’t like execution as a means of punishment, but I do understand it. I mean, had my mother been the victim of such a horrible crime … Well, you get the idea. No society needs to be too free with execution because there is no return from that, no chance of reform or rehabilitation, and no chance to correct a mistake if it had been made in the process of arrest or trial. We should be very reluctant to use capital punishment.
But when it comes to a person who takes money from another to kill someone, there cannot be any excuse for such an act. It is calculating, cold-blooded, and purely evil. When a person gets caught up in the rage of the moment and commits a homicide, I can at least understand that. One can get so angry that he or she loses control and does something without thought, without premeditation.
Murder-for-hire is exactly the opposite. It is a deliberate, planned taking of a human life. It is beyond reprehensible. For a person to murder like that, he or she must be dead inside, lacking conscience, lacking even the rudiments of mercy.
I will not go into the brutality of this particular murder, but it was so heinous that defense attorneys objected to the photos of her body even being shown in the trial. My father described the life-saving efforts to me that he and the other EMTs used and the condition Liz was in and he was almost in tears even all these years after the fact. If you stop to consider that this is how the men who killed Liz planned it, the crime takes on an even more hideous aspect.
They could have done something that would have ended her life quickly, but they did not even extend that mercy to her. Maybe we can object to Alabama executing this man using nitrogen hypoxia, but murder-for-hire is one of those crimes that is so callous it is hard to object to the execution itself.
In the end, I wish we had no call to execute anyone, but when crimes of such wanton brutality are carried out, my compassion does not overwhelm my desire for retribution in kind because every family who endures a murder must always live under the shadow of the crime.
Reach Gary Cosby Jr. at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Hard to feel compassion in Alabama's latest execution | GARY COSBY JR.
