Alabama Executes Inmate Using Unprecedented Method of Nitrogen Gas Asphyxiation
Alabama, a state in the southern United States, executed prisoner Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday by asphyxiating him with nitrogen gas, a method that had never been tested before, according to authorities. Smith, who was sentenced to death for the contract killing of a woman in 1988, was declared dead at 8:25 PM local time after inhaling the nitrogen gas through a mask and depleting his oxygen supply.
In his final words, with the mask already on, Smith stated, “Tonight, Alabama takes humanity a step backward. Thank you for supporting me. I love you all.”
Journalists who witnessed the execution reported that after the gas began to flow, Smith writhed for a couple of minutes and then appeared to have labored breathing for several more minutes. John Hamm, the director of the Alabama Department of Corrections, stated in a subsequent press conference that the inmate’s convulsions were “involuntary” but within the expected range.
The nitrogen gas flowed for approximately 15 minutes. The execution proceeded after the United States Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, rejected the inmate’s last-minute appeal earlier in the day, giving the green light to proceed with the procedure. Progressive Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three justices who voted to halt the execution, argued that “by not being able to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has chosen him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test an untried method of execution.”
Since the reintroduction of the death penalty by the Supreme Court in 1976, 1,583 prisoners have been executed in the United States, with 73 of them taking place in Alabama.
Family members of both Smith and his victim, Elizabeth Senner, witnessed the execution at a prison in Atmore, a rural area of Alabama. “He has a debt to pay, and we don’t care how it happens,” said Mike, one of Senner’s two children, to a local news outlet days before the execution.
That debt dates back to 1988 when a pastor from Colbert County, on the other side of Alabama, paid Smith and another man, John Forrest Parker, $1,000 each to kill his 45-year-old wife, Elizabeth. The plan was to make it look like a domestic robbery gone wrong. The pastor was having an affair with another woman, was bankrupt, and had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife, which he would collect upon her death. The husband committed suicide when he became a suspect, and Parker was executed by lethal injection in 2010.
Smith was supposed to meet the same fate in November 2022, on the initial date set for his execution. However, the executioners were unable to locate his veins and failed to insert the necessary intravenous lines before the legal deadline for carrying out the execution expired.
Alabama authorities decided to replace the lethal injection with nitrogen gas asphyxiation, a method that has been used in cases of euthanasia.
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