The state of Alabama (southern United States) executed prisoner Kenneth Eugene Smith this Thursday suffocating it with nitrogen gas, a method never tried beforeas the authorities announced.
To Smith, sentenced to death for the murder of a contract woman in 1988He was pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m. local time (02:25 GMT on Friday) after inhaling nitrogen gas through a mask and running out of oxygen.
His last words, already with his mask on, were: “Tonight, Alabama is making humanity take a step back. Thank you for supporting me. I love you all.”
Journalists who witnessed the execution reported on it that after the gas began to flow, Smith was seen writhing for a few minutes and then breathing heavily for several more minutes.
Alabama Department of Corrections Director John Hamm said this in a subsequent press conference The prisoner's shaking was “involuntary” but nothing out of the ordinary, which was to be expected.
Nitrogen gas flowed for approximately 15 minutes
The Supreme Court of the United States Minutes before the execution, he rejected the prisoner defense's final appeal passed on the same Thursday with a vote of 6 to 3, giving the green light for the procedure to begin.
Progressive Sonia Sotomayor, one of three justices who voted to stop the execution, argued that “Smith was not killed on his first attempt, Alabama chose him as a “guinea pig.” to try out an execution method that has never been used before.”
Alabama had already attempted to execute Smith in November 2022, but the executioner was unable to insert the intravenous lines. As part of a later agreement, Alabama agreed not to make another attempt to kill him by lethal injection.
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The Office of the High Commissioner for United Nations for human rights, International amnesty, Human Rights Watch or the community of San Egidio had asked the United States in recent days not to allow the execution.
Smith was on death row for murdering a woman, Elizabeth Sennett, in 1988 at the request of her husband, Charles Sennett, who wanted to seek compensation. Smith and an accomplice, John Forrest Parker, each received $1,000.
Sennett committed suicide a week after the murderwhen he realized authorities were considering him a suspect, while Parker was also sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in 2010.
“We forgave the three people involved years ago”Mike Sennett also expressed a feeling they described as “bittersweet” at a press conference with his two brothers, the sons of the murdered woman, after witnessing the execution of the last person involved.
“Evil actions have consequences”
All eyes were on Alabama and its new method of executionthe first chair developed since the introduction of lethal injection in 1982, which has become the majority in the country over the past four decades, displacing the electric chair.
Alabama decided to try nitrogen gas because of the difficulties it has faced in recent years States that still use the death penalty to purchase lethal drugs given the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to use them for this purpose.
In addition, complications that have arisen in several executions since 2014 – some in Alabama – have led to the method being questioned as inhumane and the subject of legal disputes for years.
Other states eagerly awaited the execution in Alabama, to also introduce the nitrogen asphyxiation method. Although Oklahoma and Mississippi have already approved the method, they have not yet developed a protocol for its use or built the facilities.
Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 1,583 prisoners have been executed in the United States, 73 of them in Alabama.