Michael Dewayne Smith Executed in Oklahoma for 2002 Double Murder | US Death Row –
He knows the gas off him. Poured it on him. Poured it on whatever I touched in there. Poured the gas on the cash register, burned the whole up. She panicked and she got shot. You know what I’m saying? She was like, “HELP! HELP!” HE SHOT a man nine times. Then he poured lighter fluid over the body and lit it on fire.
The man he killed wasn’t even the right person. He had the wrong name, the wrong face, the wrong store. He was a 22-year-old college student working a part-time job to build a future. And he died because of a newspaper quote that had nothing to do with him. That detail alone would make this case unforgettable.
But it’s not the detail that will stay with you the longest. What will stay with you is what happened on the morning of April 4th, 2024. What he said when they asked for his final words. And what one witness saw on his face after the drugs had already done their work. His name was Michael Dewayne Smith. He spent 21 years on death row in Oklahoma, convicted of two murders committed on the same afternoon.
Two people who never knew each other killed hours apart for reasons rooted entirely in gang loyalty and a case of catastrophically mistaken identity. This is his story. And the story of a legal system forced to answer a question it still hasn’t answered cleanly. Where exactly is the line between justice and something else entirely? Before we talk about Michael Dewayne Smith, we need to talk about the two people who lost everything.
Sharath Babu Peluru was 22 years old. He had come to Oklahoma as a student, chasing a degree, building something, doing what millions of young people do when they believe the future is worth showing up for. He was working as a store clerk at a convenience store to make ends meet while he studied. He was not a gangster.
He was not an informant. He was not involved in anything. He was, by every account, exactly what he appeared to be. A young man at the beginning of his life. On the morning of February 22nd, 2002, Sherath Paluru went to work. He did not come home. Janet Moore was 41 years old. She worked in the insurance division at OU Medical Center.
A steady job, a responsible life, a woman who showed up. On the same morning that Sherath Paluru was getting ready for his shift, Janet Moore was in her apartment in East Oklahoma City getting dressed for work. Her son, Philip Zachary, lived nearby. She was, by all accounts, an ordinary woman in the middle of an ordinary morning. She answered her door or didn’t get the chance not to.
Michael DeWayne Smith shot her dead. Two victims, same day, killed hours apart. Neither one deserved to be anywhere near what was coming for them. Michael DeWayne Smith was born on June 24th, 1982 in Oklahoma City. He grew up hard. His father died when he was 10 years old. By the time he was a teenager, he was habitually using PCP and had joined a street gang, the Hoover Crips.
His street name was Hoover Killer. He had, by any measure, grown up in an environment that offered very few exits and a lot of open doors leading nowhere good. In November 2001, just a few months before the murders, Smith was already linked to the shooting death of a 26-year-old man named Otis Payne Jr. killed outside a nightclub in Northeast Oklahoma City.
Smith admitted to handing the gun to the shooter. He was later convicted of second-degree murder for that crime and sentenced to life in prison. But, by the time that verdict came down, something else had already happened. In early 2002, three of Smith’s fellow gang members had attempted to rob a convenience store.
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The store owner shot and killed one of them in self-defense. Smith wasn’t there. He wasn’t part of the robbery. But, when he read in a newspaper that an employee at the store had made disrespectful comments about the gang, dismissive, contemptuous comments about the man who had just been killed, Smith decided someone needed to answer for it.
He identified what he believed was the right store, the right employee, and on February 22nd, 2002, he walked in and shot Sheriff Paluru nine times. Then, he poured lighter fluid over the body and set it on fire. Paluru had nothing to do with the newspaper quote. He worked at a neighboring shop. He wasn’t even the person Smith was looking for.
It was the wrong man at the wrong place for the wrong reason. Hours later, Smith went to the apartment of Janet Moore. He was looking for her son, Philip Zachary, who he believed had been cooperating with police. Zachary wasn’t home. Moore was. When she panicked and cried out for help, Smith shot her, too. He was arrested, tried, and convicted.
On October 14th, 2003, Oklahoma County District Judge Twyla Mason Gray sentenced Michael Dewayne Smith to death, twice, once for each murder. She also handed him an 85-year sentence on related robbery, burglary, and arson charges. Judge Gray stated plainly that the victims were hard-working people who did not deserve to die, and that given the brutal nature of the killings, the death penalty was the only appropriate response.
Morris’ son, Philip Zachary, the man Smith had originally come looking for, stood in that courtroom and said that justice had been served for his mother. Smith was 21 years old when he was sentenced to die. He would spend the next two decades on death row. And for a long time, that appeared to be the end of the story.
Until his attorneys raised a question that the state of Oklahoma was not prepared to answer cleanly. Michael DeWayne Smith had on multiple occasions been tested and assessed for intellectual disability. The results came back with IQ scores of 76 and 79. Those numbers sit squarely in the range that the Supreme Court of the United States, in its 2002 ruling in Atkins versus Virginia, said was grounds to exempt a person from execution.
The ruling was explicit. Executing individuals with significant intellectual disabilities violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Smith’s attorneys argued that their client fell within that protected category. That the state of Oklahoma had no legal right to execute him. That whatever he had done, the Constitution drew a line.
And Michael DeWayne Smith was standing on the protected side of it. Oklahoma disagreed. The state’s courts reviewed the IQ scores, reviewed the assessments, and concluded that Smith’s results did not meet their threshold for intellectual disability. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals pointed instead to what they called a very detailed, highly corroborated confession.
One supported by physical evidence and by additional statements from others involved. The courts held that Smith was legally eligible for execution and that his appeals had been exhausted. By March 2017, every avenue of appeal had been closed. Smith was formally eligible to be executed.
His execution date was set, April 4th, 2024. Here is the detail that critics of the case kept returning to. Another Oklahoma death row inmate named Darren Peakins with IQ scores remarkably similar to Smith’s had been granted relief under Atkins versus Virginia back in 2005. His scores were comparable. The threshold applied to him was different.
Two men, similar cognitive profiles, two entirely different outcomes. Whether that inconsistency represents the law working as intended, drawing careful distinctions case by case, or represents something far more troubling about how the legal system applies its own rules unevenly, depending on factors that have nothing to do with the Constitution itself, is something people argued about for years. And nobody gave a clean answer.
Michael Dewayne Smith’s story did not follow the expected path. In the years after his conviction, prosecutors didn’t just argue that Smith was dangerous based on what he had done before his arrest. They argued that he remained dangerous inside the walls of the prison itself. Even in a highly restricted area, even under constant supervision, Smith had managed to fashion weapons.
He maintained contact with gang members both inside and outside the prison. He was, in the state’s view, 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, for his part, told a different story. Days before his scheduled execution, he spoke to reporters from HuffPost.
He said he was innocent. He said that his confession had been given while he was under the influence of PCP, that he had no memory of committing the crimes, and that the inconsistencies in that confession had never been adequately addressed. He said he was staying in good spirits for the most part.
He said 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. Clemency denied. But what happened next, in the final days before the execution, was something that took even seasoned observers by surprise. His spiritual adviser, a reverend named Jeff Hood, began speaking publicly.
Not in legal terms. Not in the language of appeals or precedent. He spoke about what he was watching happen to a man he had come to know. He said that Smith was tearful in the days leading up to his death. That he was not cold or defiant or resigned in the way people might expect. That there was something else happening inside him that the legal record would never fully capture.
Nobody anticipated that the most human element of this story would come not from the lawyers, not from the courts, but from a reverend standing beside a condemned man in the final hours. During his 21 years on death row, Michael Dewayne Smith became, 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 Jeff Hood as a spiritual adviser. He maintained relationships with family, with the reverend, with others inside the prison walls who knew him not as a case number or a headline, 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.
He once said, in the days before his death, that he was good, given the circumstances. He said it calmly, not bitterly, not with the edge of someone performing composure for an audience. There was something almost bewildering about the equanimity in those words, given everything that was coming. His attorney, Mark Henrickson, spoke on behalf of his family before the execution.
The statement he delivered 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.” Whether the man who walked into that execution chamber on the morning of April 4th, 2024, was the same man who had committed those crimes in February of 2002, and whether that matters to how you feel about what happened, is not for anyone to say.
Michael DeWayne Smith made no last meal request. Nothing. He asked for nothing. That single detail, in a story full of details, is one of the ones that tends to stop people. Not a comfort meal, not a ritual, just nothing. On the morning of April 4th, 2024, Smith was transported to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma.
He had said his goodbyes. He had spoken quietly with Reverend Jeff 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. The Attorney General of Oklahoma, 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, potassium chloride to stop the heart, was administered by lethal injection. At the start of the process, Smith looked directly at Attorney General Drummond. He held that gaze.
Within minutes, he began to snore audibly. He was declared unconscious at 10:14 a.m. He was declared dead at 10:20 a.m. He was 41 years old. When execution team leader Jason Sparks approached the table and asked Michael DeWayne Smith if he had any final words, Smith looked at him and said, “Nah, I’m good.” That was it. Three words.
After that, with his microphone off, he turned to Reverend Jeff Hood and spoke quietly. Whatever passed between them in those final seconds, no media witness could hear it. But, the director of the Department of Corrections confirmed afterward what had been said. Smith had been expressing love to his family.
He was declared dead at 10:20 a.m. Central Time, April 4th, 2024. Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who witnessed the execution, stood by the decision of the state. The evidence had been overwhelming. The jury had spoken. The courts had affirmed it at every level. Justice, in the state’s view, had been carried out. Reverend Jeff Hood walked out of that penitentiary and said something different.
He said, “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. They called her an angel on Earth and in heaven. They said her death had caused a ripple for generations to come.
They said justice had been served. The family of Sheriff Peluru said he had been the life of our family. 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. Michael DeWayne Smith was 41 years old. He had spent 21 years on death row. On April 4th, 2024, he was executed by the state of Oklahoma. The 12th person put to death since the state resumed executions in 2021 and the first of that year.
One tear was observed falling from his right eye after he appeared to be dead. His spiritual advisor was the one who noticed it. Two victims who did nothing wrong. A confession given under the influence of drugs that the defendant later said he didn’t remember making. An intellectual disability argument that succeeded for one inmate and failed for another with nearly identical scores.
A man who shot a stranger nine times and burned the body. And then, 21 years later, said his final words quietly to a reverend while a room full of witnesses watched. None of it resolves cleanly. None of it is supposed to. But here is the question I want to leave you with. And I want a real answer in the comments, not just a reaction.
Given that another Oklahoma inmate with nearly identical IQ scores was spared execution under the same Supreme Court ruling, do you believe Michael DeWayne Smith should have received the same protection? Or does the nature of the crimes change your answer? Drop it below. Think it through before you write it. More stories like this every week.
You know where to find them.
