Alabama inmate Kenneth Smith executed with nitrogen gas, marking the emergence of a wholly new method of capital punishment

CNN ^ | 9:51 PM EST, Thu January 25, 2024 | By Dakin Andone and Isabel Rosales, CNN

[Red Badger]

Alabama has put to death Kenneth Smith, the first death row inmate known to die by nitrogen gas, marking the emergence of a wholly new method of execution in the United States, one that some experts had said is veiled in secrecy and could lead to excessive pain or even torture.

Earlier Thursday, the US Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal by Smith’s attorneys to halt the execution. Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have paused the execution. The Supreme Court also declined to halt the execution a day earlier.

Smith’s time of death was 8:25 p.m. local time Thursday, according to a news release from Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.

Smith, who was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder for hire, survived the state’s initial attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2022. On Thursday, he accepted a final meal of steak, hashbrowns and eggs, according to information released by the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Little is known about how the set method of execution, known as nitrogen hypoxia, was carried out because the state’s published protocol bears redactions experts say shield key details from public scrutiny. The state, in court records, indicated the redactions were made to maintain security and it believes death by nitrogen gas to be “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”

But Smith and his team were skeptical. “The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse,” the inmate and his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said midday Thursday in a joint statement. “Our prayer is that people will not turn their heads. We simply cannot normalize the suffocation of each other.”

[mware]

Wouldn’t that be like getting “the bends” Worse ways to go but it wasn’t an easy death, but then the woman he killed wasn’t easy either.