By Kim Chandler
Associated Press
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama is preparing to execute an inmate convicted in the 1994 killing of a convenience store clerk, a case where the jury recommended life imprisonment for the one-time Eagle Scout but a judge handed down the death penalty.
Ronald Bert Smith, Jr., is set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. CST Thursday for the Nov. 8, 1994, shooting death of Huntsville store clerk Casey Wilson. It would be Alabama’s second execution this year if carried out.
Wilson was pistol-whipped and then shot through the head during the robbery, court documents show. Surveillance video showed Smith entering the store and recovering spent shell casings from the bathroom where Wilson was shot, according to the record.
A jury convicted Smith of capital murder in 1995 and recommended life imprisonment by a 7-5 vote, but the judge sentenced Smith to death. In a clemency petition to the governor, Smith’s lawyers said he was an Eagle Scout at 15 and was the son of a NASA contract employee whose life spiraled downward because of alcoholism and emotional scars from an abusive home environment.
Lawyers for Smith, now 45, and the state submitted a flurry of last court filings over whether a judge should have sentenced Smith to death when a jury recommended life imprisonment. Smith’s attorneys have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block the planned execution to review the judge’s override.
Smith’s lawyers argued a January decision that struck down Florida’s death penalty structure because it gave too much power to judges raises legal questions about Alabama’s process. In Alabama, a jury can recommend a sentence of life without parole, but a judge can override that recommendation to impose a death sentence. Alabama is the only state that allows judicial override, they argued.
“Alabama is alone among the states in allowing a judge to sentence someone to death based on judicial fact finding contrary to a jury’s verdict,” attorneys for Smith wrote Wednesday.
Lawyers for the state argued in a court filing Tuesday that the sentence was legally sound, and that it is appropriate for judges to make the sentencing decision.
“A juror’s sentencing decision is likely to be the only decision about criminal punishment he or she will ever make, and it will come at the end of an emotionally draining trial, which will often be the first and only such trial a juror will have seen,” lawyers for the state wrote.
Judge Lynwood Smith, now a federal judge, sentenced Smith to death. He likened the killing to an execution, saying the store clerk was beaten into submission before being shot in the head in a crime that left an infant fatherless. In overriding the jury’s recommendation, the judge also noted in court records that, unlike many other criminal court defendants, Ronald Smith came from a middle-class background that afforded him opportunities.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday denied an execution stay in a separate request filed by Smith. The appellate court ruled Smith waited too late to file a challenge to Alabama’s lethal injection process.
Alabama has been attempting to resume executions after a lull caused by a shortage of execution drugs and litigation over the drugs used.
The state executed Christopher Eugene Brooks in January for the 1993 rape and beating death of a woman. It was the state’s first execution since 2013. Judges stayed two other executions that had been scheduled this year.