The Alabama Supreme Court is set to decide whether or not to allow the state to become the first to execute an inmate by a new method: asphyxiation with nitrogen gas, Reuters reports.
Kenneth Smith, sentenced to death for murder in AlabamaPhoto: Alabama DOC / MEGA / The Mega Agency / Profimedia
Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the court to allow the state to proceed with the gassing of Kenneth Smith, convicted of murder in 1996, using a face mask connected to a nitrogen cylinder designed to deprive him of oxygen.
Smith’s lawyers have argued that the untested protocol could violate the US Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishments” provision. They are due to file a challenge to the attorney general’s request for the death penalty in court on Friday.
Death penalty experts also say the state has not provided enough information about how it will mitigate the danger to execution staff and others of using an invisible, odorless gas inside the “death chamber “.
A convict who survived the lethal injection
Smith, 58, is one of only two people alive in the US to have survived an execution attempt after Alabama missed a previously scheduled execution by lethal injection last November when several attempts to insert the needle into a vein have failed.
Most executions in the US use lethal injections of barbiturates, but the decades-old method has become more difficult in recent years. Some states have struggled to obtain needed drugs because pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell them to prison systems.
After autopsies, it was found that the lungs of people executed by lethal injection were filled with bloody, frothy fluid, which, according to opponents of the punishment, shows that they suffered a sensation of drowning before they died.
In the warrant filing, the attorney general’s office released a heavily redacted version of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ new gassing protocol, which it calls “nitrogen hypoxia.”
In the gas chambers used in previous executions by US states and in Nazi concentration camps, poisonous gases such as hydrogen cyanide were used to kill.
Nitrogen, however, is not poisonous, making up about 78% of breathable air. In Alabama’s proposed method, which lawmakers approved in 2018, it is meant to replace the oxygen inhaled by the inmate.
“It’s clear to me that they have no idea what they’re doing”
Oklahoma and Mississippi have also approved executions by nitrogen asphyxiation, but have not yet tried the method.
Uncensored portions of the Alabama protocol indicate that Smith would be placed on a stretcher and a mask would be placed over his face. Many details about the new device remain unclear, but the mask has both an inlet tube attached and an exhaust mechanism for exhaled breaths.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory School of Medicine who has been an expert witness in challenging execution protocols, said it’s difficult enough for doctors to maintain a seal when applying a mask to an unconscious patient, and it’s unclear how Alabama is approaching it. this problem when using a mask on a conscious and possibly uncooperative prisoner.
“It’s clear to me that they have no idea what they’re doing. If there’s air getting under the mask, then he’s not going to die,” Zivot said. Someone who is temporarily deprived of oxygen but doesn’t die risks serious damage to the brain and other organs.
Kenneth Smith was convicted of murdering a preacher’s wife in 1988, a contract killing paid for by the preacher himself.
