Death row prisoner to be executed in method vets say is too cruel for animals
The US was set to execute a man with nitrogen gas on Thursday evening, an untested method vets deem “too distressing” for use on many animals, after executioners failed to kill him by lethal injection.
Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, has been on death row for more than three decades after being convicted in 1989 of a murder-for-hire.
He is one of just two living prisoners to have survived an hours-long botched execution attempt by lethal injection in 2022. As a result, the state of Alabama approved death by nitrogen hypoxia, a method which the United Nations has likened to “torture”.
Smith is to be put to death at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, during a 30-hour window beginning at 12am local time (6am GMT) on Thursday.
The last US execution using gas was carried out in 1999 when a convicted murderer was put to death using hydrogen cyanide gas.
Alabama is one of three US states that have approved the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution. It involves administering nitrogen gas through a facemask, depriving the body of oxygen.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the UN rights office in Geneva, urged Alabama last week to abandon plans to execute Smith using the “novel and untested” method.
Ms Shamdasani said it could “amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, under international human rights law.”
While nitrogen gas has never been used to execute humans in the US, it is sometimes used to kill animals.
But even the American Veterinary Medical Association has advised against using nitrogen gas to euthanise most mammals, calling it “distressing”.
Experts have repeatedly warned that nitrogen toxicity may cause a person to suffer unnecessarily, while at the same time threatening the health of others in the room.
Alabama’s protocol for execution by nitrogen asphyxiation makes no provision for sedation prior to execution.
Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett, a pastor’s wife.
Her husband, Charles Sennett, who had arranged the murder, committed suicide a week after her death.
Smith had appealed to the US Supreme Court for a stay of execution, but the nation’s highest court rejected the request on Wednesday without comment.
Smith has a separate appeal lodged in federal court. That court has not yet issued its ruling.
The state of Alabama, in a filing urging the court to reject the stay, defended the method of execution, claiming that it was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
According to a recent Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, the lowest level since 1972.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 US states, while the governors of six others - Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee - have put a hold on its use.
There were 24 executions in the US in 2023, all of them carried out using lethal injection.
