The state of Oklahoma carried out the execution of Michael DeWayne Smith on Thursday morning, ending a 21-year legal saga that repeatedly forced the courts to confront the murky intersection of intellectual disability, gang violence, and catastrophic mistaken identity. Smith, 41, was pronounced dead at 10:20 a. m.
Central Time at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, making him the 12th inmate executed in the state since it resumed capital punishment in 2021 and the first of this year.
His final words, delivered without hesitation or apparent fear, were three simple syllables directed at the execution team leader: “Nah, I’m good.” Witnesses reported that Smith then turned his head toward his spiritual advisor, Reverend Jeff Hood, and spoke inaudibly with the microphone off. Corrections officials later confirmed he was expressing love to his family members, none of whom were present in the witness room.
One witness noted a single tear falling from Smith’s right eye after he was declared dead, a detail that Reverend Hood said he observed and would carry with him.
The crimes that placed Smith on death row occurred on the morning of February 22, 2002, a single afternoon that destroyed two families who had never met and never shared a single connection beyond the violence that found them both. The first victim was Sharath Babu Peluru, a 22-year-old college student from India who was working as a convenience store clerk to fund his education and build a future in America. He was not a gang member, not an informant, not involved in any criminal enterprise.
He was simply present at a neighboring shop when Smith, acting on a newspaper quote about disrespectful comments allegedly made by an employee toward the Hoover Crips gang, walked in and opened fire.
Peluru was shot nine times. Smith then poured lighter fluid over the young man’s body and ignited it, attempting to destroy evidence in a scene that investigators later described as among the most brutal they had encountered. The quote that triggered the attack had nothing to do with Peluru.
He was the wrong man at the wrong store, a catastrophic error that Smith himself later acknowledged during his confession, though he maintained that the confession itself was unreliable because he was under the influence of PCP at the time he gave it.
Hours later, Smith arrived at the apartment of Janet Moore, a 41-year-old insurance division worker at OU Medical Center. He was searching for her son, Philip Zachary, whom he believed had been cooperating with police in an unrelated matter. Zachary was not home.
Moore was. When she panicked and cried out for help, Smith shot her dead. Two victims, two families, one afternoon, and a legal process that would take more than two decades to reach its conclusion.
Smith was born on June 24, 1982, in Oklahoma City, into circumstances that offered few exits and many doors leading nowhere good. His father died when he was ten years old. By his teenage years, he was a habitual PCP user and had joined the Hoover Crips, adopting the street name “Hoover Killer.”
In November 2001, just months before the murders, he was linked to the shooting death of 26-year-old Otis Payne Jr. outside a nightclub, admitting to handing the gun to the shooter. He was later convicted of second-degree murder for that crime and sentenced to life in prison, though the double murder convictions and death sentences would supersede that punishment.
The trial in October 2003 produced swift convictions on both murder counts, along with an 85-year sentence for related robbery, burglary, and arson charges. Oklahoma County District Judge Twyla Mason Gray delivered the death sentence twice, once for each murder, stating plainly that the victims were hard-working people who did not deserve to die and that the brutal nature of the killings left no alternative. Philip Zachary, the man Smith had originally come looking for, stood in that courtroom and declared that justice had been served for his mother.
What followed was a legal battle that would test the boundaries of the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which held that executing individuals with significant intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Smith’s attorneys argued that their client fell squarely within that protected category.
IQ tests administered over the years produced scores of 76 and 79, numbers that sit within the range the Supreme Court had identified as potentially qualifying for exemption.
The state of Oklahoma disagreed. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed the scores and the assessments and concluded that Smith’s results did not meet their threshold for intellectual disability. The court pointed instead to what it called a “very detailed, highly corroborated confession,” one supported by physical evidence and additional statements from others involved.
By March 2017, every avenue of appeal had been exhausted, and Smith was formally eligible for execution.
The inconsistency that critics of the case continued to raise involved another Oklahoma death row inmate named Darren Peakins. Peakins had IQ scores remarkably similar to Smith’s and had been granted relief under Atkins back in 2005. Two men, comparable cognitive profiles, two entirely different outcomes.
Whether that disparity represented the law working as intended, drawing careful distinctions case by case, or represented something far more troubling about how the legal system applies its own rules unevenly, became a central point of contention in the years leading up to Smith’s execution date.
In the years after his conviction, prosecutors argued not only that Smith was dangerous based on his pre-arrest conduct but that he remained dangerous inside the prison itself. Even in highly restricted areas, even under constant supervision, Smith had managed to fashion weapons. He maintained contact with gang members both inside and outside the prison walls.
In the state’s view, he was not a man who had reformed or retreated from who he had been; he was someone who had simply moved his operation behind bars.
Smith told a different story in the days before his execution. Speaking to reporters from HuffPost, he maintained his innocence, arguing that his confession had been given while under the influence of PCP and that he had no memory of committing the crimes. He pointed to inconsistencies in that confession that he said had never been adequately addressed.
He said he was staying in good spirits for the most part and that he was good, given the circumstances.
In March 2024, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted on his clemency application. The result was four to one against, and clemency was denied. What happened next took even seasoned observers by surprise.
Reverend Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual advisor, began speaking publicly not in legal terms but about what he was watching happen to a man he had come to know. He described Smith as tearful in the days leading up to his death, not cold or defiant or resigned in the way people might expect. There was something else happening inside him that the legal record would never fully capture.
During his 21 years on death row, Smith had become, by most accounts, someone different from the 19-year-old who had pulled a trigger twice in a single afternoon. He had found faith. He worked with Reverend Hood as a spiritual advisor.
He maintained relationships with family and with others inside the prison walls who knew him not as a case number but as a person. He was, by the time his execution date arrived, a 41-year-old man who had spent more than half his entire life inside a cell waiting for a morning he could not prevent.
His attorney, Mark Henrickson, delivered a statement on behalf of the family before the execution that was quiet and devastating. “Their relatives remain slain, and the only practical difference will be that the Smith family will join them in grief, and the totality of the sufferings will increase tenfold.” The statement captured the paradox at the heart of the case, that the machinery of justice, designed to address grief, would inevitably create more of it.
Smith made no last meal request. He asked for nothing. That single detail, in a story full of details, is one that tends to stop people.
Not a comfort meal, not a ritual, just nothing. On the morning of April 4th, he was transported to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He had said his goodbyes.
He had spoken quietly with Reverend Hood, who was permitted to be present as his spiritual advisor. His family was not in the witness room. Every appeal had been denied.
The Pardon and Parole Board had spoken. The courts had spoken. Attorney General Gentner Drummond was in the witness room.
The victim’s family members were there. Media witnesses were there.
At 10:09 a. m. , the execution process began.
The three-𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 protocol, midazolam to sedate, vecuronium bromide to paralyze, and potassium chloride to stop the heart, was administered by lethal injection. At the start of the process, Smith looked directly at Attorney General Drummond and held that gaze. Within minutes, he began to snore audibly.
He was declared unconscious at 10:14 a. m. and declared dead at 10:20 a.m.
Attorney General Drummond, who witnessed the execution, stood by the decision of the state. The evidence had been overwhelming, he said. The jury had spoken.
The courts had affirmed it at every level. Justice, in the state’s view, had been carried out. Reverend Hood walked out of that penitentiary and said something different.
“What happened today was unnecessary. Oklahoma is going to be no different this afternoon than it was this morning. No safer.
The only thing that it’s going to be is less ethical.”
The family of Janet Moore released a statement calling her an angel on Earth and in heaven, saying her death had caused a ripple for generations to come and that justice had been served. The family of Sharath Peluru said he had been the life of their family and that his sudden death in such a violent manner had affected their lives every single day since. They said they were thankful justice was served.
Smith’s own family said nothing publicly beyond what their attorney conveyed, that the only practical outcome of this day was that they too would now know grief.
The case leaves behind a question that the legal system has not answered cleanly and likely never will. Given that another Oklahoma inmate with nearly identical IQ scores was spared execution under the same Supreme Court ruling, should Michael DeWayne Smith have received the same protection? Or does the nature of the crimes change the answer?
The witnesses who watched him die saw a man who appeared calm, who said he was good, who expressed love to his family in his final moments. The man who committed those crimes in 2002 was described as something else entirely. Whether those are the same person, and whether that matters to how the execution should be judged, is a question that will follow this case long after the legal record has closed.