The State of Alabama plans to kill this Thursday Kenneth Eugene Smith, accused of the murder of a woman in the late 1980s. It is not the first time they have tried it, they already tried to execute him in November 2022 by the lethal injection method, but after a long time they gave it up as impossible when the clock was around midnight and the order was about to expire. It was not an act of mercy; They simply couldn't find the vein.
Smith's second date with death is also surrounded by uncertainty. The Alabama executioners will try a new method of execution on him: gas asphyxiation. The plan involves placing an airtight mask on his face and forcing him to inhale pure nitrogen until he is left without oxygen in his body and, once he loses consciousness, causes his death. If it works, it would be the first innovation in the battery of execution methods used in the 27 United States states in which capital punishment is legalized since the introduction in 1982 in Texas of lethal injection, a method that in these 42 years It has been used to kill 1,377 convicts.
Oklahoma and Mississippi also approved nitrogen hypoxia (its technical name) in 2018, but have not yet taken the step of using it. So there are no more precedents for what may happen to Smith this Thursday starting at 6:00 p.m. (local time) than those contained in texts in medical journals about assisted suicides in Europe or workplace accidents caused by gas leaks. A federal judge last week rejected the appeal for clemency from the death row convict's lawyers and the Supreme Court decided this Wednesday not to intervene to stop the execution.
According to the procedure approved and disseminated by the authorities of the state in the south of the country last summer, Smith will hear the reading of his sentence from the prison warden, will be able to exercise his right to say his last words or to remain silent, and from the next room the system will be activated. “After the introduction of nitrogen gas [en el organismo del reo], will be given for 15 minutes or for five minutes after the EKG shows a flat line. Whatever happens first,” says the official document, which was distributed to all prisoners awaiting their time on death row in Alabama.
The method differs from that of the gas chamber, in force, although out of use, in some States. The last prisoner thus executed was Walter LaGrand. It happened in 1999 in Arizona and it took 18 minutes for the man to die inside a sealed room that they filled with cyanide.
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The search for alternatives to lethal injection has intensified in recent years, given that pharmaceutical companies have been refusing, for reasons of corporate image, to sell these drugs to the States, whose stocks have expired. Additionally, in 2011, the European Union banned the export of these drugs to the United States. According to experts, this is the method that fails the most: public radio NPR reviewed the autopsies of 200 prisoners executed in this way and concluded that, despite the appearance that they died peacefully, 84% suffered pulmonary edema, a waterlogging that creates a drowning-like sensation. The governor of Alabama, Republican Kay Ivey, imposed a moratorium, lifted in 2023, on its use after the failed attempt to kill Smith: it was the third time in a row that they had to return a prisoner to his cell after putting him through that macabre trance.
Problems with lethal injection have caused execution by firing squad to return in some territories: Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah now consider it among their capital punishment options. Idaho and Tennessee are thinking about it.
United Nations complaint
The authorship of the idea of execution with nitrogen is Stuart A. Creque, a horror and science fiction television scriptwriter who wrote an article in the conservative magazine in 1995 National Review in which he raised the possibility. In September he defended her in another text, published in The Wall Street Journal and titled At last there is a humane method of execution. Anti-death penalty activists and medical experts have serious doubts about this, and have criticized Alabama's new execution technique for everything that could go wrong: that inhalation causes vomiting and the inmate chokes to death, that the gas does not do its job. work and Smith is left in a vegetative state, or a nitrogen leak occurs.
Ravina Shamdasani, The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights protested last week against the announced execution, considering that “this type of gas asphyxiation entails special pain and suffering.” “We are concerned that the prohibition of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as well as their right to effective remedies, may be violated,” Shamdasani said.
Smith, 58, was convicted of participating in the 1989 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett with another man named John Forrest Parker. They stabbed her and beat her to death with a fireplace poker in exchange for a $1,000 payment promised to each of them by the victim's husband, an adulterous pastor who later called the police and tried to pass off the plot as a violent raid on the family home. When he was cornered, he committed suicide before being accused. Alabama killed Parker with a lethal injection in June 2010. A third person involved in the murder, Billy Gray Williams, who was charged with the husband and the other two, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. and died in prison in 2020. The victim's two children are scheduled to attend Smith's execution on Thursday.
In a written interview given to the BBC last week, the prisoner asked the State for clemency “before it is too late.” “I get nauseous all the time,” he added. “Panic attacks plague me regularly… This is just a small part of what I have been dealing with on a daily basis. Basically, [se trata de] torture”.
Another risk that experts warn about is that the airtight seal of the mask fails or that it gives way between Smith's seizures. A nitrogen leak could then end the life of the Reverend Jeff Hood, who will attend the execution to accompany the condemned man in his last breath. Hood has had to sign a document releasing the State of Alabama from liability if something goes wrong and he ends up dying or remaining in a vegetative state.
Since 1976, the year the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the United States, Alabama has killed 72 people. The first execution came in 1983. Currently, the inmate population on death row is 167 prisoners, five of whom are women.
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