The US state of Alabama on Thursday carried out the country’s first execution using nitrogen gas, a controversial method the UN has likened to “torture.”
Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for a 1988 murder, was pronounced dead at 8:25 pm (0225 GMT Friday), according to local media, citing a statement from the southern state’s Governor Kay Ivey.
“Alabama is using an untested, unproven method of execution,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“It’s never been used before to execute anyone in the United States, or anyone in the world as far as we know,” Maher told AFP. “No one knows what’s going to happen, including Alabama officials themselves.”
Smith was subjected to a botched execution attempt in November 2022, when prison officials were unable to set intravenous lines to administer a lethal injection.
In an interview with National Public Radio in December, Smith said he was “absolutely terrified” about his upcoming execution and still suffering “trauma” from the previous failed attempt.
“Everybody is telling me that I’m going to suffer,” he said.
The last US execution using gas was in 1999 when a convicted murderer was put to death using hydrogen cyanide gas.
There were 24 executions in the United States in 2023, all of them carried out by lethal injection.
Alabama is one of three US states that have approved the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi.
‘Torture’
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the UN rights office in Geneva, urged Alabama last week to abandon the plan to execute Smith using what she called a “novel and untested” method.
Shamdasani said it could “amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, under international human rights law.”
While nitrogen gas has never been used to execute humans in the United States, it is sometimes used to kill animals.
But Shamdasani pointed out that even the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends giving large animals a sedative when being euthanized in this manner.
Alabama’s protocol for execution by nitrogen asphyxiation makes no provision for sedation.
The state of Alabama has defended the method of execution, claiming it is “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
Smith and an accomplice, John Parker, were convicted of the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett for which they were each paid $1,000.
Charles Sennett, who had arranged his wife’s murder, killed himself a week after her death. Parker was executed by lethal injection in 2010.
Smith appealed to the US Supreme Court for a stay of execution but the nation’s highest court denied the request on Wednesday without comment.
Further appeals for a stay are pending but the conservative-dominated court has rarely granted such requests in recent years.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, the lowest level since 1972.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 US states, while the governors of six others — Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — have put a hold on its use.
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