Alabama carried out the first execution in the United States using nitrogen gas on Friday (Jan 26). Kenneth Smith, convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire case, was a unique inmate who faced an unsuccessful execution in November 2022. Alabama authorities paused his deadly injection as they struggled for hours to properly implant the intravenous needle.
Alabama has defined its most current process as “the least painful and most humane form of execution known to humanity”.
What is the procedure?
Kenneth Smith was expected to lose consciousness within one to two minutes and die shortly after.
According to capital punishment experts, while fatal gases such as hydrogen cyanide have previously been used in executions, this is the first time an inert gas has been used to cause suffocation in a death sentence.
Critics of the death sentence, including UN human rights experts, claim that it is a form of human experimentation that may injure rather than kill the individual or result in a torturous death.
Reverend Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual counselor, expressed his anguish, emphasizing the particularly heinous nature of conducting a human experiment with legal suffocation. Hood, who was present at the execution, was required to sign a waiver admitting the “unlikely” risk of dying to nitrogen hypoxia.
States in the United States that practice the death penalty are having difficulty obtaining lethal injection medications because pharmaceutical companies are limiting their supply in accordance with a European ban on commodities used in torture or executions.
Oklahoma and Mississippi lawmakers have supported nitrogen-asphyxiation execution protocols similar to Alabama’s, although they have yet to be implemented.
Kenneth Smith, guilty of murdering a preacher’s wife, Elizabeth Sennett, received a life sentence recommendation from 11 of 12 jurors.