And the US Supreme Court said no for the second time. This Thursday, shortly before 7:00 p.m. local time, the Washington Supreme Court upheld an order from the previous day rejecting the postponement of the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith. Alabama can move forward tonight with its plans to execute the prisoner using a new method of execution, nitrogen asphyxiation, that they are introducing with him. Smith is sentenced to death for the contract murder of a preacher's wife in the late 1980s. The southern state is poised to test a new form of killing criticized as “inhumane” by anti-death penalty activists and the United Nations on a prisoner already sent to the gallows in 2022 to receive a lethal injection . So they couldn't find the vein and couldn't take him down.
The witnesses, including five journalists who were allowed to witness the execution, the condemned man's lawyers and the victim's two children, got into a van that drove to Holman Prison in the city after hearing the court's decision. by Atmore. Smith was to be fitted with an airtight mask by prison officials and then left alone in the room with his confessor, the Rev. Jeff Hood. From the next room, the guard then activates the mechanism so that pure nitrogen begins to enter the body of the 58-year-old executed person until he is deprived of oxygen.
Beforehand, Smith said goodbye to his wife and family and ordered his last meal (steak, hash browns and eggs topped with meat sauce, ordered from the fast food chain Waffle House). His lawyers asked the Supreme Court to stop the execution in extreme cases. The defense's argument stuck to the trial. Doctors, anti-death penalty activists and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights shared concerns that death would be slow and painful, that inhaling the gas would cause vomiting and that the prisoner would drown. that the gas would not do its job, leaving Smith in a vegetative state, or that there would be a leak.
Demonstration last Tuesday in front of the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, to demand that Governor Kay Ivey stop the execution of Smith. Center, from left, three exonerated death row inmates, Randall Padgent, Gary Drinkard and Ron Wright. Mickey Welsh (AP)
They also complained about a timing issue: “Smith was selected for enforcement even though he had managed to fully exhaust the claims raised in a separate proceeding from the failed attempt.” [de 2022]”says the document submitted to the Supreme Court. “And the state is moving forward despite increasing evidence of increasing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that pose a significant risk that he will vomit and suffocate during the execution, which causing him ongoing pain and suffering.”
“A burning nail”
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The Alabama attorney general's office rejected those efforts, saying Smith was “grasping at straws.” “The district court found (twice) that Smith's fear was 'speculative,' 'theoretical,' and 'improbable,'” the response states. And the 11th Circuit agreed that “there is no evidence that Smith could vomit if nitrogen was introduced into the mask.”
The protocol approved by Alabama promised that “after the introduction of nitrogen gas [en el organismo del reo], is administered for 15 minutes or five minutes after the ECG shows a flat line. “Whatever happens first.”
Smith, 58, was convicted of participating in the 1989 contract killing of Elizabeth Sennett along with another man named John Forrest Parker. They stabbed them and beat them to death with a poker in exchange for a payment of $1,000 each promised to them by the victim's husband, an adulterous minister who later called the police and attempted to portray the plot as a violent attack to spend on the family home. When he was cornered, he committed suicide before being charged. 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 resort to nitrogen hypoxia is due to the problems caused in recent years by lethal injection, a method introduced in Texas in 1982 and with which 1,377 convicts were killed in those 42 years.
The search for alternatives has recently intensified as pharmaceutical companies, for image reasons, refuse to sell these drugs to states whose stocks have already expired. Additionally, in 2011, the European Union banned the export of these drugs to the United States. This is one of the reasons why only five states carried out the death penalty in 2023. Smith was the third prisoner in a row to be sent to die in Alabama, later returning to his cell due to impotence to find the vein.
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