DThe judicial authorities in the state of Alabama have long since drawn up the execution protocol. On death row at the Holman Correctional Facility, about 200 kilometers southwest of the capital Montgomery, Kenneth Eugene Smith will have a mask placed over his mouth and nose next Thursday. Instead of air, the convicted murderer then breathes nitrogen – according to the protocol, until death, which is expected to occur after five to 15 minutes.
The fifty-eight-year-old is expected to become the first death row inmate in the United States to die from nitrogen hypoxia on the night of January 25th. As Smith's lawyers argued in the federal court lawsuit, the method of execution was not sufficiently examined. “Our client becomes a test subject,” said lawyer Robert Grass. Execution by nitrogen, a death by asphyxiation, violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”
The execution has already been stopped once
The Smith case has plagued Alabama since November 2022. At that time, the death row prisoner lay strapped to an execution couch with leather straps for almost four hours while prosecutors debated whether to postpone the execution and justice officials tried in vain to establish an intravenous line for Smith to be injected with poison. The execution was eventually stopped. In the summer of 2023, the Justice Department requested a second execution date. In early November, the state Supreme Court agreed to execute Smith by nitrogen. According to Governor Kay Ivey, the death row inmate had chosen the method of execution himself. Along with Oklahoma and Mississippi, Alabama is one of the states that has allowed suffocation for several years.
After the Supreme Court's approval, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall also remembered Smith's victim: Elizabeth Sennett. On behalf of her husband, a pastor, Smith and an accomplice brutally killed Sennett in their home in Sheffield in the spring of 1988. According to the coroner's office, he and John Forrest Parker repeatedly stabbed the forty-five-year-old with a knife, kicked her and injured her with a fire poker.
Her husband Charles Sennett recruited them through a neighbor and paid them $1,000 each. Sennett, who wanted to cover up an affair and gambling debts, committed suicide a few days later, and the neighbor was sentenced to life in prison. Parker was executed by lethal injection in the summer of 2010 after more than 20 years in prison. His accomplice Smith was repeatedly in court. At the first criminal trial in the fall of 1989, the jury voted in favor of the death penalty, which was then still the electric chair. After an appeal, the court suspended the verdict for the time being. At the second murder trial, the jury demanded life imprisonment, but the judge still handed down a death sentence in 1996.
Federal court dismissed Smith's request for a temporary stay of execution
The federal court dismissed Smith's request for a temporary stay of execution last week. Execution with nitrogen is a new method. When lethal injection (today the most common form of execution) replaced the gas chamber, firing squad and gallows, it was also new. “Smith is not entitled to a painless death,” said Judge Austin Huffaker. His lawyers also failed to show that nitrogen hypoxia constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Following the refusal of many European and American pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs such as thiopental and pentobarbital for lethal injections, many of the 27 states that continue to hand out death sentences are looking for alternatives. Kentucky, Tennessee and Florida, for example, allow executions by electric chair. Utah reintroduced firing squads in the spring of 2015 if poison deliveries failed to materialize.
Alabama, which sentences more criminals to death per capita than any other state, has been allowing death row inmates to choose between lethal injection or nitrogen since 2018. After several failed executions with poison at the end of 2022, including Smith's, the southern state suspended further attempts for the time being. Alabama's push to become the first American state to use nitrogen for executions prompted an appeal from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last week, saying Smith's suffocation may constitute a form of torture.
Michael Sennett, the son of Smith's victim Elizabeth Sennett, leaves this debate untouched. “It doesn’t matter to me how he dies. The only thing that matters to me is that he dies,” the forty-year-old told NBC. If Smith is headed to death row, Sennett wants to be there.
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