Alabama kills Kenneth Smith in its first nitrogen gas execution

  Alabama carried out its first-ever nitrogen gas execution on Thursday, killing 58-year-old Kenneth Smith just over a year after he survived a botched lethal injection.

In Smith's final days, his lawyers asked the Supreme Court to prevent the execution of the death sentence. They argued that a second attempt to kill Smith — with an untested mechanism, before he had exhausted his appeals in state court, and while he was still suffering from PTSD symptoms from the first attempt — would violate the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruelty and unusual cruelty. punishment.

The court denied the request, with the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting. The conservative majority did not provide a written explanation for the decision.

“After failing to kill Smith on his first attempt, Alabama chose him as a ‘guinea pig’ to test a never-before-tried execution method.”,Sotomayor wrote in opposition. “The world is watching.” “Twice now this court has ignored Smith's warning that Alabama would expose him to an unconstitutional risk of pain. “For the first time, Smith’s predictions came true,” Sotomayor said. “This time, he expects the Alabama protocol will cause him to choke and choke to death on his own vomit. I sincerely hope he doesn't prove himself right a second time. As Smith's execution date approached, he was vomiting continuously for several days in a row, his lawyers said in court documents, citing post-traumatic stress disorder he had been suffering from since his first execution date. In response, the Alabama Department of Corrections said it would deprive Smith of solid foods, starting at 10 a.m. Thursday, to reduce the risk of vomiting into a gas mask.

⚠️BREAKING - Alabama prepares to carry out first execution by nitrogen asphyxiation

Kenneth Smith, convicted of a 1988 murder-for-hire will be executed using asphyxiation with nitrogen gas. This is a new method the state hopes to advance as a simpler alternative to lethal… pic.twitter.com/gvuDzRnUi8

— 🇺🇲Salty Texan (@texan_maga) January 25, 2024

His lawyers said that Smith is the second person in the history of the United States to face a second execution attempt after his attempt failed. The first was in 1946 in Louisiana, when the electric chair malfunctioned. Smith's death represents the first known execution of nitrogen gas, properly referred to as nitrogen hypoxia, in the world.

The Alabama Attorney General's Office claimed without evidence in its rebuttal case that nitrogen "is perhaps the most humane method of execution ever undertaken." The limited information that exists about nitrogen as a killing agent comes from the euthanasia of small animals as well as the study of industrial accidents and suicides. The American Veterinary Medical Association said in its 2020 euthanasia guidelines that nitrogen hypoxia should not be used to kill most mammals and that mice exposed to nitrogen gas showed signs of "panic and distress" before collapsing and dying.

Alabama did not kill Smith and Nitrogen out of a desire to make his death more pleasant. The state first authorized nitrogen executions in 2018 amid drug shortages and legal challenges to existing lethal injection procedures. The decision to actually carry out the nitrogen execution came after the state failed to execute Smith by lethal injection in November 2022, the third consecutive botched lethal injection in Alabama that year.

“The eyes of the world are on the imminent moral apocalypse,” Smith and the Rev. Jeff Hood, his spiritual advisor, said in a joint statement Thursday morning. “Our prayer is that people won't turn their heads. “We simply cannot normalize suffocating each other.”

Hood, who was in the execution chamber with Smith for last rites, was required to sign a waiver admitting his risk of exposure to odorless, tasteless nitrogen gas.

Smith was killed as punishment for his participation in a 1988 murder-for-hire plot to kill the pastor's wife. Reverend Charles Sinnett Sr. wanted to kill his wife, Elizabeth Sinnett, in an apparent robbery so he could collect the insurance payout. The 11-1 jury recommended that Smith, who admitted to helping plan the attack but denied stabbing the victim, be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The judge bypassed the jury and imposed the death sentence.

If Smith had been tried today, he would not have been sentenced to death. In 2017, Alabama became the latest state to prohibit judges from overriding jury recommendations to impose death sentences.

'It took 22 minutes for him to die, which is a very long time.'

Convicted murderer Kenneth Smith has become the first person in the U.S. to be executed with nitrogen gas. It's a method that many human rights groups have branded as 'barbaric'. pic.twitter.com/fCNImxKD9G

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 26, 2024

Alabama Department of Corrections During Alabama's first attempt to kill Smith on November 17, 2022, he lay strapped to a gurney, unable to move for nearly four hours. While on the stretcher, he was unaware that a federal appeals court had issued a stay of execution, which the Supreme Court quickly overturned. Once his appeals were exhausted, execution officials tried unsuccessfully to place two intravenous lines, thread needles in and out of his arms and hands and ignore his complaints of pain, his lawyers wrote in a letter. A complaint was filed in federal court shortly after the attempted execution.

The IV team then tilted the stretcher backwards, forcing Smith into a “reverse crucifixion position with his head under his feet,” the complaint states. He was pricked five or six times with a clear syringe and several times with a large needle into his collarbone. Smith was in so much pain that he resisted the restraints, injuring his shoulder and making it difficult to breathe.

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“They were sticking me over and over again, going into the same hole like a weird sewing machine,” Smith told NPR in an interview last year. “I was completely alone in a room full of people, and none of them tried to help me at all – and I was screaming for help.”

When the execution was finally called off, Smith was unable to stand, walk or dress without assistance, the complaint said. He experienced severe PTSD symptoms, including nightmares, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, and dissociation. Until his death.

Before his first execution date, Smith filed a lawsuit against Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jon Hamm, alleging that the state's lethal injection procedure violated his Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court has previously held that for a method of execution challenge to prevail, the prisoner must choose an alternative method that is feasible and available and minimizes the risk of pain.

Haddad identified nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative, but the state said it was not an “available” alternative.

“Then, on the eve of being required to disclose information regarding its failed attempt to execute Mr. Smith by lethal injection, ADOC suddenly changed course and now claims to be prepared to carry out executions using nitrogen hypoxia,” Smith’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. .

The one-size-fits-all mask used to deliver nitrogen gas may not form a proper seal and could allow oxygen into the mask, the attorneys warned. If that happened, they said, Smith could suffer a long and painful death, a stroke, or a persistent vegetative state.

Lawyers also cited concerns about the purity of the nitrogen and a lack of clarity about how it is stored to prevent contamination. Airgas, an Alabama gas distributor, previously said and will not supply nitrogen for executions, according to AL.com, a local news outlet.

Although Smith suggested nitrogen as an alternative to lethal injection, he did not agree to be killed under a process “hastily introduced as a means of discussing Mr. Smith’s pending lawsuit regarding the (Alabama Department of Corrections)’s previous failed attempt to carry out a death sentence.” “By lethal injection and preventing discovery,” his lawyers wrote.

UN experts warned earlier this month that nitrogen executions would likely violate the international ban on torture.

“We are all complicit as Alabama moves forward with a state-sponsored murder that stirs up disturbing memories of the Holocaust,” said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of the Fair and Just Prosecution Service, a group of progressive prosecutors.

“As a civilized nation, our desire for revenge should not override our humanity,” she said in a statement. “Today we failed this basic test. We unequivocally condemn this execution and once again urge decision-makers across the country to abolish the barbaric use of the death penalty.