A week later her husband, Charles Sennett, a minister in the Church of Christ, killed himself after detectives began to focus on the fact that he had been having an affair, was deep in debt, and had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife.

The scheme was concocted, the Marshall Project discovered, by a criminal justice professor with no medical or scientific training whose main claim to expertise was as a former prosecutor in the western Pacific Ocean islands of Palau – one of the smallest countries in the world, population 18,000.

The idea that he would co-operate with the department of corrections in his own demise reminds Smith, he told the Guardian, of what guards said to him as they were trying to stick a giant needle under his collar bone during the failed 2022 execution.

Should the execution go ahead, his wife Deeanna will be with him in the witness section of the death chamber, but he will have to have a final word in advance with his 78-year-old mother Linda – “my little mama” – and his 12-year-old grandson Crimson, named after the University of Alabama football team.

His lawyers are making eleventh-hour appeals to federal judges, arguing that both the proposed use of nitrogen and the fact that Smith has already been traumatized by the failed attempt to kill him are forms of cruel and unusual punishment barred under the US constitution.

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