Alabama has been given permission to use nitrogen gas to kill a death row inmate later this month. On Wednesday, a federal judge denied inmate Kenneth Smith’s request for an injunction to halt the nitrogen hypoxia execution, which experts and his lawyers have described as harsh and experimental.
Nitrogen will be utilized as a means of execution for the first time in the United States.
Are you a test subject?
Smith’s request was denied, and his lawyer’s contention that the inmate was being utilized as a “test subject” for an untested execution procedure was discarded.
According to CBS News, Kenneth Smith’s attorneys want to challenge the federal judge’s judgment. The question of whether nitrogen can be used for executions may eventually up before the United States Supreme Court.
How will the execution take place?
Alabama intends to employ a respirator-style face mask to replace the murder-row inmate’s oxygen supply with nitrogen. He will perish as a result of a lack of oxygen.
Is it inhumane?
Nitrogen hypoxia is currently legal in three US states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. This is, however, the first time the execution mechanism will be used.
Smith’s defenders are adamant that this unproven execution process violates the US Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.”
They argue that any subsequent effort to execute him would be unconstitutional
The inmate’s attorneys have also claimed that in 2020, the American Veterinary Medical Association cleared nitrogen hypoxia specifically for pigs under its death rules. Nitrogen hypoxia, it claimed, might create a “anoxic environment that is distressing for some species” in other mammals.
International experts, including four UN human rights special rapporteurs, have also expressed severe worry about the possibility of “grave suffering” and “a painful and humiliating death” for Smith if he is asphyxiated with an inert gas.
They argue that the execution would certainly violate an international convention that specifically prohibits torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or humiliating punishment, to which the United States is a signatory.
However, citing industrial mishaps in which people pass out and die within minutes, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office stated in court filings that oxygen deprivation will “cause unconsciousness within seconds, and cause death within minutes.” The defense lawyers’ objections have been disregarded as hypothetical.
Kenneth Smith, who are you?
Kenneth Smith, 58, is a murderer-for-hire who was condemned to death in 1988 for the murder of a preacher’s wife.
Smith was exposed to nitrogen hypoxia after Alabama failed his first execution attempt in November 2022. Due to repeated useless attempts to establish an intravenous line, the fatal injection failed, leaving him as one of just two people in the United States to survive an execution attempt.