As the leader of Alabama’s execution team, Brandon McKenzie is sometimes the last person to touch a prisoner while they’re still alive. He has played a key role in executions, directing a team of around a dozen prison guards on execution nights and performing tasks that can impact how long it takes for someone to die or whether they feel pain.
Alabama prison officials gave McKenzie these responsibilities even after a prisoner accused the guard of smashing his head through a window, then driving him head-first into a concrete floor.
The injuries McKenzie inflicted were severe and lasting, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the prisoner, Lawrence Phillips, in May 2020. Phillips lost consciousness and was taken from Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore to a Mobile hospital. Medical records show he was treated for bleeding in his brain and received sutures, staples, and a neck brace.
“I’ve not been the same since, and my memory fades in and out at the time,” Phillips wrote in his complaint. “I have nightmares, accompanied with post traumatic stress from the fears of this happening to me again.”
McKenzie, who was promoted to captain two months after Phillips filed the lawsuit, claimed that he was acting in self-defense; attorneys from the state who represented the officer wrote in a legal filing that Phillips “angrily lunged” at McKenzie, who reacted by “using his elbow to protect himself and push inmate Phillips away, and they then collided with a glass window nearby.” Another incarcerated person who witnessed the altercation submitted an affidavit supporting Phillips’s account.
McKenzie didn’t respond to questions from Bolts and The Intercept about his role in executions or the allegations of abuse from Phillips.
While the Alabama Department of Corrections, or ADOC, ultimately concluded that the use of force was warranted, Katherine Nelson, a federal magistrate judge, thought the lawsuit against McKenzie should proceed. In a report and opinion denying the officer’s effort to resolve the case before trial, she wrote that a reasonable jury could conclude “that the force was applied maliciously and sadistically to cause harm, rather than in a good faith effort to restore or maintain order.” Court records show that in August 2023, McKenzie’s state lawyers and Phillips settled the suit. The settlement terms were not disclosed.
