Elizabeth Brunix says she has never done an interview like the one she did last year.

He called me the night of his attempted execution.

And I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone in the course of my reporting who was so shaken.

It was last November.

Alabama officials had just tried to execute Kenneth Smith.

The 34 years earlier had been convicted in the murder for hire of Elizabeth Senate.

They had tried to execute him, but they had failed.

They sat him down in the prison office and allowed him to make a phone call to his wife

and he asked her to three-way me in.

He just wanted to make sure that he got down on the record what happened immediately

while it was on his mind.

Brunix had reported a series of stories about problems with lethal injection in Alabama.

And so Smith had named her as a personal witness to his execution.

But she never made it to the viewing room.

No one did.

Instead, here's what happened, according to what Smith told her in that interview and

what his lawyers later laid out in legal briefs.

And a warning here that throughout this episode, there will be some pretty graphic descriptions.

So Kenny was strapped down to a gurney for I believe a total of four hours.

Even though he won a stay in the 11th Circuit, he was kept strapped down and not given any

information about the course that his litigation was taken.

That stay was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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