Alabama wants to be the first state to put a prisoner to death by forcing him to breathe only pure nitrogen.
On Friday, the 58-year-old death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith’s legal team petitioned the Alabama Supreme Court to establish a date for his execution. According to the court document, Alabama intends to execute him using nitrogen hypoxia, a form of execution that is legal in three states but has never been employed.
Nitrogen hypoxia is brought on by denying the prisoners oxygen and requiring them to breathe only nitrogen, which results in their death. Humans breathe 78% nitrogen, which is safe to breathe when combined with oxygen. Although supporters of the new technique claim it will be painless, detractors have compared it to human experimentation.
Due to a lack of medications for performing lethal injections, Alabama allowed nitrogen hypoxia in 2018, although up to this point, the state has not sought to utilize it to carry out a death sentence. Mississippi and Oklahoma have also approved nitrogen hypoxia but haven’t used it yet.
A new wave of legal disputes over the method’s constitutionality is anticipated to begin after Alabama’s readiness to deploy nitrogen hypoxia is made public.
As a result of Alabama’s history of “failed and flawed executions and execution attempts,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative, “experimenting with a never-before-used method is a terrible idea.”
Angie Setzer, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, stated that no state in the US has carried out an execution utilizing nitrogen hypoxia and that Alabama is in no position to experiment with an entirely untested and unutilized execution technique.
Last year, Alabama attempted to put Smith to death by lethal injection, but they aborted the execution due to difficulties in placing an IV in his veins. It was the state’s third such occurrence since 2018 and its second within two months of being unable to execute an inmate. Gov. Kay Ivey imposed a moratorium on executions the day following Smith’s botched lethal injection operation in order to undertake an internal assessment of the protocols. Lethal injections were resumed by the state last month.
One of the two men found guilty in the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of a preacher’s wife was Smith. The attorney general of Alabama claimed that it was time to execute the death sentence.
Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement on Friday that it was “a travesty” that Kenneth Smith had been spared the death penalty for almost 35 years after being found guilty of the brutal murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett.
Alabama has been working on the nitrogen hypoxia execution method for a while but hasn’t said anything about its objectives. The specifics of how the execution will be carried out were not detailed in the attorney general’s court brief. Last month, John Hamm, the commissioner of corrections, told reporters that a protocol was almost finished.
Smith is among the Alabama inmates who have argued that they should be let to die through nitrogen hypoxia instead of being executed via lethal injection.
Smith’s lawyer, Robert Grass, declined to comment on Friday.
On March 18, 1988, Sennett’s body was discovered in the house she and her husband shared on Coon Dog Cemetery Road in Colbert County, Alabama. According to the prosecution, Smith was one of two men who received $1,000 each to kill Sennett on her husband’s behalf because he was heavily indebted and wished to recover insurance money.
The killing and the identities of those responsible for it shook the little village in north Alabama. 2010 saw the execution of the other man convicted of the murder. According to court records, the Church of Christ pastor and the victim’s husband Charles Sennett committed suicide when the investigation turned to him as a potential suspect.