Elections

Kenneth Eugene Smith was put to death by nitrogen gas on Thursday night, the first time the method was used in capital punishment in the U.S.Alabama carried out on Thursday the first execution using nitrogen gas in the United States, an untested method that was the subject of debate before it was used. The inmate, Kenneth Smith, was pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m. Central time at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal to stay the execution.Here are a few things to know about the case.Who was Kenneth Smith, and what was his crime?Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was one of three men convicted in the stabbing murder of Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett, 45, whose husband, a pastor, had recruited them to kill her in March 1988 in Colbert County, Ala.According to court documents, Ms. Sennett, a mother of two, was stabbed 10 times in the attack by Mr. Smith and another man. Charles Sennett Sr., Ms. Sennett’s husband, had recruited a man to handle her killing, who in turn recruited Mr. Smith and another man.Mr. Sennett arranged the murder in part to collect on an insurance policy that he had taken out on his wife, according to court records. He had promised the men $1,000 each for the killing.What were the circumstances around his death sentence?Mr. Smith was convicted in 1996. At his sentencing, 11 out of 12 jurors voted to spare his life and to sentence him to life in prison, but the judge in the case, N. Pride Tompkins, decided to overrule their decision and condemned him to death. In 2017, Alabama stopped allowing judges to overrule death penalty juries in such a way, and such rulings are no longer allowed anywhere in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

Sarah Sinclair and Rafael Musa invite us in.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — I met Sarah Sinclair online when she posted a free knitting pattern for a Spelling Bee beanie on social media and tagged both me and Sam Ezersky, the editor of the game. As someone who knits, I thought this was fabulous, so I included a link to the pattern in a Wordplay column.Sarah Sinclair’s Spelling Bee beanie pattern features Beeatrice, the game’s cartoon mascot.Sarah Sinclair, via RavelrySam Ezersky, the Spelling Bee editor, with a hat made by Ms. Sinclair.Sarah Sinclair, via RavelrySince then, Ms. Sinclair has created patterns for a Wordle hat, a Crossword streak hat and more. She also made her New York Times Crossword debut in 2022, and has had bylines in the Universal Crossword and the Modern Crossword, a part of Puzzle Society.This is Rafael Musa’s 10th puzzle in The New York Times and, from what Ms. Sinclair says in her notes below, he is an excellent collaborator.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The actor was killed in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina, the authorities said.Herbert Coward, the actor whose modest career included the small but memorable role of Toothless Man in the 1972 thriller “Deliverance,” was killed on Thursday in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina. He was 85.Mr. Coward died after he drove onto U.S. Highway 23 in Haywood County in the western part of the state and was struck by a truck, said Sgt. Marcus Bethea, a North Carolina State Highway Patrol spokesman. A passenger in Mr. Coward’s vehicle, Bertha Brooks, 78, was also killed, as were a Chihuahua and pet squirrel, Sergeant Bethea said.Mr. Coward, who lived in Canton, N.C., in Haywood County, was often seen with his pet squirrel, according to local news reports.The 16-year-old driver of the truck was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to Sergeant Bethea. He said that it was unclear what had led to the crash and that no charges had been filed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

Ms. Jane starred in the highest-budget film series in pornographic film history.Jesse Jane, a one-time Hooters waitress and beauty pageant contestant who went on to star in the highest-budget film series in pornographic film history, was found dead on Wednesday at a home in Oklahoma. She was 43.The cause was believed to be a drug overdose, said Lt. Francisco Franco of the Moore Police Department in Moore, Okla. He said that officers responded on Wednesday morning for a welfare check at a house where Ms. Jane and her boyfriend, Brett Hasenmull, had been staying. They were both found dead, Lieutenant Franco said, adding that the deaths remained under investigation.Ms. Jane, with her sweeping blonde hair, high-arched eyebrows and vivacious personality, was a defining star of early 2000s pornography as the internet transformed the industry. She then crossed over into some mainstream productions.“She was a performer during an era where adult films were seen all over the world, and the promotions were massive,” Brian Gross, a publicist for the porn industry, said in a text message to The New York Times. “She made sure that she gave her all, not only in performing, but in promotion as well.”Jesse Jane was born on July 16, 1980, as Cynthia Ann Howell in Fort Worth, Texas, according to public records. Her family settled in the Oklahoma City area when her parents worked at Tinker Air Force Base, according to a 2006 interview Ms. Jane gave The Oklahoma Gazette. She graduated with honors from Moore High School in 1998.Ms. Jane modeled for retailers like 5-7-9 and David’s Bridal before landing a job for a commercial with Hooters, the restaurant chain, The Gazette wrote. Eventually she worked her way up in the organization to regional training coordinator before deciding to become a full-time Hawaiian Tropic bikini model.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

“Invasion Day is the reason why we’re all here today, but we must go beyond that,” one activist said.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.Parades, Union Jack themed barbecues, angry protests, and reflective vigils — it’s 2024, and Jan. 26 in Australia remains a day that inspires many different reactions across the nation.Formally Australia Day but also known as Invasion Day or Survival Day, the date marks the violent arrival of British settlers to the continent in 1788, and it has a long history as a political flashpoint for Indigenous affairs.This year, a First Nations advocacy group in Darwin decided to go bigger — with a hybrid protest for Indigenous Australians, Palestinians and the people of West Papua, which was annexed by Indonesia decades ago, leading to a prolonged conflict.“Yes, Invasion Day is the reason why we’re all here today, but we must go beyond that,” said Mililma May, who runs the group, a nonprofit called Uprising of the People.Ms. May, a Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman, said that what was needed for all groups were practical and tangible ways to understand colonialism. By bringing separate protest movements together with a common goal “to demand land back,” she said she hoped Jan. 26 would unify oppressed groups and appeal to a broader cross-section of Australians.It’s also an effort meant to bring attention back to unresolved issues.In the months after the failure of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum — devised to enshrine an Indigenous advisory group in the Australian Constitution — First Nations issues have dropped off the mainstream news agenda and slid down the government’s to-do list.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

4

SMITH v. HAMM

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting

likelihood of success on the merits of his claim challenging Alabama’s undeterred implementation of its heavily redacted, 5-month-old protocol. The equities here, as in nearly all capital cases where the prisoner has shown a reasonable probability of success on the merits, favor Smith. See Bucklew, 587 U. S., at (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting). While I would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari and summarily reverse the Eleventh Circuit’s order affirming the denial of Smith’s preliminary-injunction motion, at a minimum, I would grant Smith’s request for a stay of execution.

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Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its “guinea pig” to test a method of execution never attempted before. Barber, 600 U. S., at The world is watching.2 This Court yet again permits Alabama to “experiment . . . with a human life,” while depriving Smith of “meaningful discovery” on meritorious constitutional claims. Id., at _______. This time around, Alabama has adopted a new protocol concerning a never-before-used method of execution. Consistent with Alabama’s “familiar veil of secrecy over its capital punishment procedures,” it has released only a “heavily redacted” version of that protocol. 2024 WL 116303, *3. Smith should be allowed to complete discovery and litigate the merits of his claims challenging this new protocol in the ordinary course. That information is important not only to Smith, who has an extra reason to fear the gurney, but to anyone the State seeks

2 See, e.g., US: Alarm Over Imminent Execution in Alabama, United Nations (Jan. 16, 2024), https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/ 2024/01/us-alarm-over-imminent-execution-alabama; United States: UN Experts Alarmed at Prospect of First-Ever Untested Execution by Nitrogen Hypoxia in Alabama, United Nations (Jan. 3, 2024), https://www. ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/united-states-un-experts-alarmed

prospect-first-ever-untested-execution. More

A Guantánamo military court heard anguishing testimony at the sentencing hearing for two Malaysian prisoners who pleaded guilty after 20 years of detention.Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two prisoners who conspired in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a U.S. military jury assembled at Guantánamo Bay to deliberate their sentence.The prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes charges for conspiring with an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out the attack. The bombings killed 202 people from 22 nations.“No God of any religion rewards such acts of horror,” said Solomon Lamagni-Miller, 18, of London. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother.Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, in the bombing and other “terrorist activities worldwide” left him despising “over 20 percent of the world population, Muslims. I’m a religious person, and the hate-filled person I have become is certainly not what I wanted.”Echoing the sentiment of several family members, he appealed to the jury to “deal with these murderers in such a manner that they can’t do to others as they’ve done to us.”For hours this week, fathers, mothers, a brother and three sisters of the victims offered anguished descriptions of searches for missing relatives, of life-altering burns and of the vacuum left by the deaths of young people who had gone on vacation in Bali and never came home.Two of Mr. Bin Amin’s elder brothers tearfully asked the jury for leniency. Then both defendants renounced their terrorist pasts, apologized to the families and said they were tortured while in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network from 2003 to 2006.The men were captured in Thailand in June 2003. A U.S. military jury is hearing the case to decide a sentence in the 20- to 25-year range, and cannot grant credit for time served. There is, however, a secondary, secret agreement in which the men could return to Malaysia later this year.Mr. Bin Amin’s brothers flew in from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, and sat in the public portion of the spectators’ gallery, where a blue curtain separated relatives of the dead from the United States, Britain and Germany.The oldest brother, Fadil, 62, an architect who was educated in Birmingham, England, sorrowfully told the court that his mother taught all 10 of her children a peaceful form of Islam. “He somehow got sidetracked” and made bad choices, he said.In the gallery sat Matthew Arnold, who traveled to Guantánamo from his home in Birmingham and testified that his brother Timothy, 43, was in Bali for a rugby tournament when he was killed “by this atrocity.”“My family’s lives have been changed completely by the actions of the perpetrators of this crime,” he said. “And I would like the court and Mr. Bin Amin, and Mr. Bin Lep, to be aware of the devastating effects of their actions on so many innocent and decent people.”Mr. Bin Amin, who hung his head at the defense table throughout the hours of testimony, apologized to the victims, his family and “all Muslims. This is not what I was taught as a child,” he said.In his two decades of U.S. detention, he said, “I have changed. I am not an angry young man anymore. I am a reformed man. My faith has evolved.”As part of their plea deal, both men offered secret testimony earlier this week for the future war crimes trial of Encep Nurjaman, a prisoner known as Hambali whom prosecutors portray as a mastermind of terrorist attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003. But both men said in their confessions that they had no firsthand knowledge of Mr. Hambali’s role in the attack.On Thursday, Mr. Bin Amin went further.“I didn’t know anything about the Bali bombing until after it happened,” he said, describing his role in the plot as helping some of the perpetrators after the bombing and assisting in money transfers that could be used for other attacks.He showed drawings he made of himself being tortured, which were recently declassified to show the jury.Col. George C. Kraehe, the case prosecutor, did not object to the artwork that showed Mr. Bin Amin nude, hooded, shackled in painful positions and at one point held spread-eagle on a plastic tarp by masked guards, with one pouring water into his nose and mouth.Christine A. Funk, Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, said the artwork display was to help the jury “in weighing appropriate punishment.” Mr. Bin Lep said he did not want the legacy of torture “to define who I am.”Also, he said, “I forgive the people who tortured me.”He admitted to his crimes. “I am guilty of my role in the Bali bombing,” he said.He described himself as “young, immature and stubborn” when he was drawn to Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 to train with Al Qaeda.“All I wish for now is peace,” he said. “I wish that peace for everyone here, but especially the victims and their families.” More