“Lethal injections largely happen, quite literally, behind a curtain; what observers do see looks vaguely surgical; what they don’t looks like a war crime.” - Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic.
The Alabama prison horror story continues to add disturbing new chapters.
According to a medical examiner who took part in Joe Nathan James Jr.’s autopsy, the botched execution shows evidence that the Alabama DOC IV team was “unqualified for the task in a most dramatic way.”
R E L A T ED: Joe Nathan James ‘suffered a long death’ in botched Alabama execution, magazine alleges - al.com
R E L A T E D: Joe Nathan James Jr.’s execution delayed for hours because of IV line problems, Alabama prisons say - al.com
R E L A T E D: Alabama inmate Joe Nathan James Jr. executed for 1994 killing of ex-girlfriend - al.com
R E L A T E D: Alabama prisons say reporter’s skirt too short to witness execution - al.com
From the Al.com story citing The Atlantic report: Alabama prison officials spent hours searching for a vein that could be used to deliver lethal drugs in the execution of Joe Nathan James on July 28, according to a recent article by Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic.
Bruenig attended an independent autopsy performed several days after James’ death and funded by the human rights group Reprieve U.S. Her detailed report is revealing, fascinating and grisly.
Here are some excerpts from Elizabeth Bruenig’s report in The Atlantic:
This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin.
A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to a vein so an execution team could deliver the lethal injection of drugs that would kill him. Despite the long delay and an unnaturally short execution, the Department of Corrections had assured media witnesses gathered to observe James’s death that “nothing out of the ordinary” had happened in the course of killing the 50-year-old. It was suspicion of that claim that led to this private autopsy.
By the time I arrived at the morgue where Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University and a lethal-injection opponent, had agreed to join a local independent pathologist named Boris Datnow and his assistant, Jay Glass, James’s body had undergone days of postmortem swelling in cool storage. My initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex. That and the carnage farther up one arm told a radically different tale than the narrative offered by the Alabama Department of Corrections, even to the naked eye. Something terrible had been done to James while he was strapped to a gurney behind closed doors without so much as a lawyer present to protest his treatment or an advocate to observe it, yet the state had insisted that nothing unusual had taken place. Approached for comment about the allegations contained in this article, Department of Corrections officials declined to speak with me.
Obdurate disregard for genuine inquiries seems to be the state’s disposition where capital punishment is concerned. In the months prior to James’s execution, Faith Hall’s brother Helvetius and her two daughters, Terrlyn and Toni, lobbied Governor Kay Ivey to spare the man’s life, repeatedly stating that they had forgiven James and had no desire to see him killed. (The Halls, like James, are Black.) Nevertheless, the execution, scheduled for 6 p.m., went ahead unhindered, with Ivey explaining her office’s disregard for the victim’s family’s wishes as a matter of principle.
When members of the media who had been selected to witness James’s execution arrived for their transport to William C. Holman Correctional Facility’s death chamber, two female journalists, the Associated Press’s Kim Chandler and AL.com’s Ivana Hrynkiw, were subjected to dress-code checks by prison staff, who demanded that Hrynkiw change from a skirt into a borrowed pair of men’s fishing waders and sneakers before allowing her to proceed as a witness. By the time everyone was shod and apparreled to the DOC’s specifications and loaded onto prison transport vans, it was 6:33 p.m.
Alabama prisons say reporter’s skirt too short to witness execution - al.com
And then, media witnesses reported, they waited—for hours. Prisoners on Holman’s death row held up signs—a captive message from a captive audience—stating that the victim’s family didn’t want James dead, that this was a murder. Time passed, then more: Finally, around 9 o’clock, roughly three hours after the scheduled time of execution, media witnesses were led into the execution chamber.
Before the injections begin, the men I’ve seen die have spoken at least briefly of love and regret. But James neither responded to his death warrant nor gave any last words—not even a refusal to offer a final statement, per Kim Chandler. In fact, witnesses, including Chandler and Hrynkiw, reported that James’s eyes stayed closed during the entire procedure, flickering only in his death throes, and that he remained unresponsive from beginning to end. His death warrant was read at 9:03 p.m., the lethal drugs began to flow at 9:04, and he was declared dead, finally, at 9:27.
What happened to James during the three-hour interval between his scheduled execution and his time of death, and why was he apparently unconscious in the execution chamber?
Jim Ransom, the last of many defense attorneys to represent James, was especially disturbed when he heard that his client hadn’t responded to the warden’s prompt to offer his last words. “That sent up red flags. It didn’t ring true,” Ransom told me the night of the autopsy. “Joe always had something to say.“ But somehow during the three-and-a-half-hour delay, James had transformed from a devout Muslim and dedicated jailhouse lawyer who, in Ransom’s telling, “wanted to fight ‘em to the very last minute” into someone mute and absent, with neither an apology for his victim’s family nor an utterance of gratitude for their efforts to save his life.
Maya Foa, an executive director at Reprieve US, agreed that an independent autopsy ought to happen—quickly. “Lethal injection was developed to mask the very torture it inflicts,” she explained over text message, “and when a prisoner is executed in secret, the only person who can tell the world what really happened is dead. We’ve seen time and again states suppressing or delaying autopsy results following executions that appear to have gone disastrously wrong.
Zivot, upon examining the body, agreed that the incision carved into James’s arm was most likely made in the death chamber, in an attempt to expose a vein that execution staff could see. The medical term for the procedure is cutdown, and its aftermath dismayed Zivot. “The use of a cutdown in this situation is a stark departure from what would be done in a medical setting,” he explained in an email. In a medical setting, ultrasound has virtually eliminated the need for a cutdown, and the fact that a cutdown was utilized here is further evidence that the IV team was unqualified for the task in a most dramatic way.”
“The details of the torture inflicted on Joe James are tragic, but unfortunately no surprise to anyone who has had a client executed in Alabama with lethal injection,” John Palombi, an assistant federal defender, told me in an email. “Adding to the torture is the refusal of the Alabama Department of Corrections to admit or accurately discuss the issues with Mr. James’ execution … There should be an immediate moratorium on all executions in the state of Alabama until a thorough investigation of Alabama’s execution process, done by people outside the Department of Corrections, is complete.”
Megan McCracken, a lawyer based in Philadelphia with expertise in execution methods, told me in an email that, “It is only because of the total lack of transparency surrounding executions in Alabama that the DOC was able to spend such a long time on failed IV access attempts. If this process had been performed openly in front of witnesses, such that anyone outside the DOC knew what was happening at the time, the attempts likely would have been stopped. It is hard to imagine that the courts would countenance this kind of harrowing procedure, but when DOCs can shield their actions and make them invisible to the public, there is no accountability.”
I spoke with two prisoners on Holman’s death row who had known James, spent some of those long years with him, seen him age and change into an older, different man—a committed Muslim who prayed regularly and devoted much of his time to studiously pursuing his own defense, not just for his own purposes, but for the sake of his friends on the row.
One of them told me that James had planned three items for his final words: To apologize to his mother and daughters, to apologize to the Hall family, and to pray the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. He felt grateful for the family’s advocacy on his behalf, even startled by it, by the abrupt unilaterality of forgiveness. But he trusted it, and he appreciated it, and he needed it.
James still hadn’t chosen the exact words he meant to say, the second prisoner told me. The mind revolts at such closely considered finalities, and James had more reason than most to hope for mercy. Somewhere deep inside, he believed the Halls’ forgiveness had saved him.
Read Elizabeth Bruenig’s report in its entirety here.
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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix.
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