Two Executions on a Thursday in America
On a recent Thursday night in America, April 21, two different states planned to preside over the execution of two different men—Oscar Franklin Smith, 72, in Tennessee; and Carl Wayne Buntion, 78, in Texas—and yet, for similar reasons, neither plan went off precisely as expected.
Smith, who was sentenced to death in 1990 for the brutal slaying of his estranged wife and her two teenage sons, was meant to represent a return to lethal injection for the state of Tennessee, which executed its previous three death-row prisoners via electrocution. In fact, Tennessee has executed five people in its electric chair since 2018, mainly thanks to lethal injection’s as a . Prison officials had last carried out a lethal injection in 2019, on Donnie Edward Johnson—with disturbing results. In life, Johnson had been party to a to the state’s method of. Johnson’s attorney, who was present at the time of his killing, reported that “” and “” noises issued from the man’s throat as he died, potentially indicating pain as he struggled to breathe.
