2024-01-26 13:48:51
The measure generated controversy due to the method used and they tried to prevent it until the end.
Alabama executed this Thursday Kenneth Smith, sentenced to death for a murder in 1988, with the nitrogen hypoxia method.
This is the first time in the United States that an execution has been carried out using the nitrogen gas procedure, marking an entirely new method in the country that some experts say has been shrouded in secrecy and could allow for excessive pain or even torture.
The Rev. Jeff Hood, his spiritual advisor, was inside the room during Smith’s execution.
The procedure took place at 8:25 p.m. local time (9:25 p.m. Miami time), according to a press release from Gov. Kay Ivey’s office.
The governor told the corrections commissioner that she would not offer clemency to Smith and authorized Commissioner John Hamm to move forward with the execution, according to the statement.
“On March 18, 1988, Kenneth Eugene Smith brutally took the life of 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett. “After more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system, Mr. Smith has been held accountable for his horrendous crimes,” the governor’s statement noted.
“The execution was carried out legally by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously requested by Mr. Smith as an alternative to lethal injection. At last, Mr. Smith got what he asked for and this case can finally be resolved,” Ivey said.
Before his death, Smith accepted a final dinner of steak, fries and eggs, after eating very little the day before, according to a statement from the Alabama Department of Corrections.
In this regard, spiritual advisor Hood previously explained to CNN that an Alabama corrections official told him that Smith would not be allowed to eat anything after 11 a.m. ET on Thursday due to concerns that he might vomit during the arrest. execution.
In addition to Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi allow death from nitrogen hypoxia, which causes a form of asphyxiation. Although neither state has attempted to use it as an execution method.
A last minute request
In a last-minute appeal Thursday, just hours before the execution, Smith again asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the proceedings so the justices could decide whether to consider a legal challenge to the ruling that authorized the execution. state to do it.
However, the court rejected the last-minute measure.
Among other things, Smith’s lawyers had argued that executing him with nitrogen gas could run afoul of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
“The State is moving forward despite mounting evidence of Mr. Smith’s PTSD symptoms, which create a substantial risk that he will vomit during the execution and suffocate, causing prolonged and unnecessary pain and suffering,” he wrote in court documents Smith’s lawyers.
Smith’s request came a day after the high court rejected another appeal by Smith to halt his execution so the justices could review a state court decision that cleared the way for state officials to carry out the execution. execution.
Lethal injection failed in first execution attempt on Kenneth Smith
This was not the first time Alabama attempted to execute Kenneth Smith. On November 17, 2022, Smith was to be executed by lethal injection, but the procedure had to be suspended after those who were going to administer it faced problems finding a vein to place the line.
Smith’s execution was called off at that time around 11:20 p.m. “Due to time constraints resulting from the delay of court proceedings,” the corrections department said in a statement, adding that the protocols necessary to carry out The execution “could not be carried out before the death sentence expired.”
Smith was initially scheduled to be executed in 2022 at 6 p.m. But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a stay of execution just hours before his sentence was set to expire at midnight.
The state then filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which less than two hours before the death order was set to expire returned its decision overturning the lower court’s and granting the state the ability to move forward with the execution. .
Although the high court order did not provide any comment on the emergency appeal, it noted that liberal Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson would have upheld the stay.
In September 2022, the state of Alabama also had to stop the execution of a death row inmate due to the inability to comply with protocols before midnight, authorities reported at the time.
In that case, it involved the planned execution of Alan Eugene Mille, which was stayed after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturned a lower court order in a long-running dispute over whether Miller would die by injection. lethal or by nitrogen hypoxia.
Both failed execution attempts came on the heels of the death of Joe Nathan James, whom the state executed in July in an execution that has since come under intense scrutiny, after a report in The Atlantic said an autopsy private showed that James “suffered a long agony.”
Corrections officials had cut into James’ skin to find a vein to place an IV, which is not part of Alabama’s lethal injection protocol, Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University, told CNN at the time. Emory who witnessed the autopsy.
Nitrogen hypoxia, a method about which little is known
There was very little information about how the established method of execution, known as nitrogen hypoxia, was carried out because the protocol published by Alabama has redacted parts that experts say shield key details from public scrutiny.
The state, in court records, said the edits were made to maintain safety and that it believes death by nitrogen gas is “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
But Smith and his team were skeptical. “The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse,” Smith and the Rev. Hood said in a joint statement at noon Thursday.
“Our prayer is that people do not look the other way. We simply cannot normalize the suffocation of each other,” they added.
“This is a protocol that has been created out of nothing,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that criticizes how capital punishment is administered in the United States, hours before the execution. United States but does not take a position on that.
“There is no precedent for this,” he told CNN. “There is no evidence of this procedure. Nobody knows how it’s going to happen.”
While decades ago some US states used lethal gas to execute prisoners, the use of nitrogen would be new: in theory, it involves replacing the air a prisoner breathes with 100% nitrogen, depriving the body of the oxygen it needs to survive.
Such displacement would lead to a painless death, according to proponents of the method, who cite nitrogen’s role in fatal industrial accidents or suicides.
The origins of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method can be traced in most sources to a 1995 article in National Review, although it has gained increasing traction in recent years as states struggle to implement lethal injection. , according to Deborah Denno, a Fordham Law School professor who has studied the death penalty for decades.
Since its inception 40 years ago, lethal injection has become by far the most prominent method of execution for the United States government and the 27 states that still carry out the death penalty.
But starting in 2009, states began losing access to medications long used to carry it out, leading to the use of alternative drugs that have led to an “increase in problems with lethal injection,” he said. Give it to CNN.
That has created a ripe moment for the emergence of another method, he said, describing the circumstances as a pattern that has been repeated for more than a century and a half, such as when electrocution – conceived as more humane than hanging – was set aside after of terrible failures.
“It was when the states were backed into a corner and they were desperate, that’s when they came up with a new method of execution,” Denno said.
Kenneth Smith’s crime for which he was sentenced to death
Kenneth Smith was sentenced to death for his role in the 1988 contract murder of Elizabeth Sennett in Alabama.
According to court records, her husband, Minister Charles Sennett, hired someone who in turn hired two other people, including Smith, to kill his wife and pass it off as a robbery.
Sennett, who courts heard had a mistress and had taken out an insurance policy for his wife, committed suicide a week after the murder, as investigators focused on him.
Smith was eventually arrested after investigators searched his home and found the Sennetts’ video recorder.
Smith’s case was tried by a jury twice, according to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. At his second trial, which took place in 1996, Smith’s jury voted 11-1 to recommend life in prison, but a judge overturned it and imposed the death penalty.
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