Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

The Alabama Murders - Part 5: Cruel and Unusual

October 23, 2025·34 min·3 clips

A second autopsy revealed prison staff used a knife to cut open an inmate's arm during a failed lethal injection attempt.

The room is elsewhere. Witnesses to an Alabama execution wait away from the chamber while the IV process happens out of sight. Time is the first clue. The execution is supposed to start at 6, but the waiting can stretch toward 7, 7:30, or 9. Nobody outside can see what is happening. Families, friends, and reporters are left with delay, and delay starts to read like its own record. That matters here. In the summer of 2022, while Kenny Smith was still appealing his sentence, Joe Nathan James was scheduled to be executed. Everything with James ran late. Afterward, the state said procedure had gone according to plan. Zivit was not satisfied with that answer, so he asked to perform a second autopsy. The second examination, done with a pathologist in Alabama, found what the official account had not shown. Zivit describes bruising and bleeding under the skin, signs of repeated attempts to reach veins. Both arms had marks. The autopsy also found evidence of a cut down, an older technique that uses a knife to expose a vein beneath the skin. The protocol at the time did not provide for it. The episode turns that hidden struggle into a plain, grim question: what counts as procedure when witnesses are kept from seeing it?

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