Murder convict Kenneth Smith was killed using the controversial new method of execution at the Atmore City Jail on Thursday evening, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced. The 58-year-old was declared dead at 8:25 p.m. local time, 29 minutes after the execution began.
The United Nations had previously condemned Alabama’s actions and spoke of possible “torture” because of the use of an execution method that had never been tested before. In so-called nitrogen hypoxia, the prisoner is given pure nitrogen through a face mask, which means he cannot breathe in oxygen and dies.
Alabama is one of three US states that allow nitrogen gas executions. However, this method had never been used in the USA before.
Pastor’s wife murdered
Smith was sentenced to death after he murdered a pastor’s wife on behalf of a pastor in 1988. The death sentence was to be carried out with lethal injection in 2022. At that time, prison staff were unable to establish access to administer the poison.
Image: (APA/AFP/Alabama Department of Correction/HANDOUT)
That’s why Smith was now executed with nitrogen gas. Several attempts to stop the execution through legal means had previously failed, including before the Supreme Court in Washington. Smith said in a radio interview in December that he was incredibly afraid of the execution. He is still “traumatized” by the failed execution attempt in 2022. “Everyone tells me that I will suffer.”
“Perhaps the most humane method”
A spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Commissioner in Geneva, Ravina Shamdasani, condemned the planned use of the “new and untested” execution method last week. This could amount to “torture or inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment” under international law.
The state of Alabama argued in a court document that the use of nitrogen gas was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.” Nitrogen gas is sometimes used to kill animals.
24 death sentences in 2023
The USA is one of the few industrialized nations that still executes people. Last year, 24 death sentences were carried out in the country, all with lethal injections. The last time a prisoner was executed with gas in the USA was in 1999. At that time, hydrogen cyanide, also known as hydrogen cyanide or hydrogen cyanide, was used.
The death penalty is controversial in the USA. According to a poll by the Gallup polling institute, 53 percent of Americans support the death penalty for convicted murderers. This is the lowest value since 1972.
