Alabama Executed Death Row Prisoner with Nitrogen

The southern U.S. state of Alabama executed prisoner Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday, January 25, suffocating him with nitrogen gas, a method never before tried. The state government called the procedure “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” Witnesses to the execution described “two to four minutes of convulsions” and “five minutes of heavy breathing,” and recounted Smith saying, “Tonight Alabama takes humanity a step back. Thank you for supporting me. I love you all.” When the gas began to flow, he looked at his wife and added, “I love you.” Smith was executed with this procedure after a failed attempt in November 2022, since the executioner failed to insert an intravenous needle into his body. As part of a subsequent agreement, Alabama pledged not to try to kill him again by lethal injection. Kenneth Smith, a life in exchange for a thousand dollarsSmith was convicted of participating in the 1989 role with another man, named John Parker, in the contract killing of Elizabeth Sennett. They stabbed and beat her to death with a fireplace poker in exchange for a $1,000 payment promised to each of them by the victim’s husband, a debt-ridden pastor seeking to collect the insurance money. He called the police and tried to pass off the plot as a violent raid on the family home. When he was cornered and about to be discovered, he committed suicide before he was charged with the crime. Alabama killed Parker with a lethal injection in June 2010. A third person involved in the murder, Billy Gray Williams, who was commissioned by the husband and enrolled the other two in the macabre mission, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and died in prison in 2020.The victim’s sons, Mike and Chuck Sennett, spoke to the press after witnessing Smith’s death. “Nothing that happened today is going to bring us back to Mom,” said Mike, who said they had forgiven the three involved in the murder. “We’re glad this is over. Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett finally got the justice she deserved.” The use of nitrogen hypoxia is due to the problems that lethal injection has been causing in recent years, a method that was introduced in 1982 in Texas and that in these 42 years has been used to kill 1,377 convicts. It is considered the form of execution that fails the most. In Alabama alone, he made three unsuccessful attempts in 2022. The search for alternatives has intensified in recent times, in view of the fact that pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell these drugs, whose stocks have already expired, to the States for reasons of corporate image. In addition, in 2011, the European Union banned the export of these drugs to the United States. That is one of the reasons why only five states administered the death penalty in 2023. In addition to Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi have approved the use of nitrogen in executions, but neither state has yet implemented it. Smith’s death thus promises to open a new era in the history of capital punishment in the United States.

Original source in Spanish