LISTEN: The sound of solidarity

When Jamie Mills walks Holman's hallways toward Alabama's execution chamber, he won't be alone.

He won’t be alone.

No one who’s walked the hallways of Holman prison toward Alabama’s death chamber ever has been.

Barring court action, Jamie Mills is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection this evening, Thursday, May 30.

Before he’s strapped to the Stryker gurney and prison staffers attempt to gain access to his veins, he’ll likely hear what many before him have — the sound of solidarity.

As Mills makes his way, shackled, through the prison’s hallways, he’ll hear it in the air. He may even feel the building shaking through the soles of his feet. His brothers, as many as 160 men who’ve been condemned by their own government to die, will beat the doors of their cells in a last attempt to let him know: they all stand together. They love together. They live and die together.

Jamie Mills, who maintains his innocence, is scheduled to be executed on the evening of May 30, barring further court action.

Early on in his time on the row, Kenny Smith — the first person to ever die by nitrogen suffocation execution — found solace in the decades-old tradition.

Time after time, as the state chose who would be next to die, the men would do their best to rally around their condemned brother, assuring him that even in his walk towards what could be his last moments on earth, they’d be there.

But over the years, Kenny said, the tradition wore on him.

In January 2024, as he prepared for his own death later that day, Kenny told me why. He said that as his years on death row passed, the sounds of solidarity made him aware that his own time was coming.

“It just became hard over time,” he told me.

Kenny said that once, he’d fallen asleep in his cell in the hours leading up to an execution. He awoke to the sound of the beating in a cold sweat.

“I thought it was time for my execution,” he said.

A drawing by Kenny Smith. He said he was drawn to this image. “I loved the light and the dark,” he said. “She looked like she just came through something, and that’s something I felt deeply, too.”

It would be many more years after that nightmare before the state would attempt to execute Smith. In November 2022, the state tried and failed to kill him by lethal injection, unable to access his veins despite repeated poking and prodding by prison staff.

After that attempt, Kenny would suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, forced to interact with the same prison guards that had attempted to kill him.

“Though mine is not post,” he wrote to me later. “It’s ongoing.”

A drawing by the men of death row depicts a prison guard “becoming what [they] once hated.”

A little over a year later, in January 2024, I watched on as Smith hugged and kissed his wife Deanna for the last time. After, his mother Linda walked him over to the guard that would bring him to his death, the first ever state-sponsored nitrogen gassing of a human being.

As he walked, he heard it — a heartbeat of hope. The banging of the doors. He walked alone, save for the prison guards at his sides. But his brothers were there, too, sharing the sound of solidarity.

Below is an exclusive audio clip of the men of Alabama’s death row rapping on their cell doors just before the nitrogen suffocation of Kenneth Eugene Smith on the evening of January 25.