Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith represented dozens of inmates on Death Row and claims he watched an innocent man die – and that US prisons are using black market drugs to carry out executions
A former Death Row lawyer says he watched an innocent man choke to death in a gas chamber – and claims the US is now using illegal drugs to carry out executions.
Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented dozens of inmates on Death Row, lost two clients to the electric chair, two to lethal injection and two in the gas chamber – including Edward Earl Johnson, executed in 1987 for the murder of a policeman and sexual assault of a woman. Johnson has always maintained his innocence. According to Smith, a woman later came forward claiming she was with Johnson at the time of the killing – but police ignored her statement. Though now retired from Death Row law, Smith continues to campaign against capital punishment.
But the tragedy of Johnson, who was just 27 at the time, still haunts him today and he recalls the last thing he told him before “choking to death”. Smith, who is British, said: “I walked into the gas chamber with Edward. He choked to death over quite a long time, about 15 minutes. That’s not really the issue, the issue was that he was locked up as a young black male in Mississippi when he was 18, and he was killed eight years later.
“I walked him into the chair, gave him a hug and he whispered in my ear ‘is there something you know I don’t know?’ He genuinely thought they still wouldn’t kill him. They then strapped him into the chair. They did it really tightly so that you couldn’t see the poor guy thrashing around.
“The witnesses are behind the chair, so they can’t see him. So they can’t see what he’s going through.” He added: “I can see him in my mind’s eye. He was the next person killed in Mississippi before they got rid of the gas chamber. I went to his funeral after his death and this woman, Mary, came up to me and she said ‘well, I know Edward didn’t do that because I was with him at the time’.
“I was really taken aback and I said, well, why didn’t you tell someone? And she said, I did, I went to the police and they told me to buzz off and mind my own business.”
Through his nonprofit, the Justice League, Stafford now works with young people and human rights. He says the recent news of botched executions doesn’t surprise him. In April, South Carolina man, Mikal Madhi, suffered a prolonged death after being killed by a firing squad. An autopsy found that shooters had missed the target on his heart, causing the 42-year-old to suffer longer than the expected window of 10 to 15 seconds.
Retired executioner Ron Andrews was left needing 13 years of therapy after watching Cuban refugee Pedro Medina, who claims he was innocent, “burn to death” over a malfunctioning electric chair. In 2022 a report from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) claimed a third of executions that year were botched or highly problematic.
Smith says he’s not at all surprised by a string of reports of botched executions. He claims because pharmaceutical companies do not want their drugs used for them, the US is turning to black market drugs for lethal injections. He added: “I was surprised, when I first got involved, about botched lethal injections because that was sold to us back in the late 70s, early 80s as a gentler form of execution.
“I think a lot of us bought into that at the time, but then I had two of my clients who I watched die in front of me and I’ve had six who’ve died, but two were on the gurney. It became pretty clear that things weren’t going as people advertised.”
He added: “It’s totally true black market drugs are being used. This was done by a student without my permission. I’m so proud of her. The US states got so desperate to get the right drugs to kill people that they were going to China and India, and they’re illegally trying to import them.”
“And so this young woman called up the Chinese and pretended to be an executing state and said, ‘could you get us some drugs?’ This was all off her own bat. I didn’t tell her to do this […] but it turned out very well. She talked to this person and they said, ‘we can send you some execution drugs, we’ll send it in the diplomatic bag’.
“Then they went on to say – and you just can’t make this stuff up – that if you want a special thing to make sure it doesn’t get discovered, we could put it in some teddy bears and send it in the diplomatic bag that way.”
The number of executions in the US hit 25 in June this year, matching the total for all of 2024, according to UK-based anti-death penalty group Reprieve. The organisation raised concerns over black market drugs used in lethal injections, as President Trump reintroduced the death penalty after returning to office.
Matt Wells, deputy director of Reprieve US, said: “The message being sent from the top is clear: President Trump wants to see more people being executed, and with most federal death sentences commuted, in the short-term at least that means more executions at the state level.
“As states rush to kill, ignoring red flags that their execution protocols are a recipe for torture, there is every danger we’ll witness more prisoners dying in agony. Evidence shows that executions scheduled in haste are more likely to go wrong. Speeding up the machinery of death may seem politically expedient in the age of Trump, but in practice, it leads to more slow and painful deaths on the gurney.”
The Daily Mirror has approached the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the US Department of Justice for comment.
