Kenneth Eugene Smith is facing execution after being convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher's wife. Photo / Alabama Department of Corrections via AP
Kenneth Eugene Smith is facing execution after being convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher's wife. Photo / Alabama Department of Corrections via AP
A killer on death row will be put to death in the United States in the coming hours using an untested method that is being criticised as horrific and likened to torture.
The state of Alabama will execute Kenneth Eugene Smith today after he lost a last-minute appeal to the US Supreme Court to halt the sentence or change the method of execution.
Smith, who was convicted of the 1988 murder-for-hire killer of Elizabeth Sennett, will become the first person in the US to be put to death by nitrogen hypoxia.
Smith’s attorneys had waged an unsuccessful legal battle to halt the execution, arguing that Alabama was trying to make him the test subject for an experimental execution method.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who along with two other liberal justices dissented, wrote: “Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before. The world is watching.”
Kenneth Eugene Smith is facing execution after being convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher's wife. Photo / Alabama Department of Corrections via AP
What is nitrogen hypoxia?
It is a form of execution in which an inmate is deprived of oxygen until they breathe only nitrogen, causing asphyxiation.
Nitrogen is a colourless, odourless gas that makes up about 78 per cent of the air we breathe. It isn’t deadly until it is separated from oxygen.
An airtight mask will be fitted to 58-year-old Smith’s face and the gas stream will continue for 15 minutes, or for “five minutes following a flat-line indication on the EKG, whichever is longer”, according to the state protocol.
Alabama insists that Smith should be unconscious within seconds and dead within minutes.
Execution method labelled ‘horrific’
There has been outrage at the approval of the nitrogen hypoxia execution method, given it has not been used before.
Smith’s lawyers fear it could lead to a long painful death which could see him choking on his vomit in the mask.
Some fear it could leave him alive but with severe brain damage from lack of oxygen.
“Horror is an understatement,” said the Rev Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser.
“The state of Alabama now has the permission of the federal court to suffocate its citizens.”
The Innocence Project – a non-profit organisation that works to help free the wrongfully imprisoned – condemned the use of the “untested” method of execution.
“Today, the state of Alabama is scheduled to conduct an execution via nitrogen hypoxia, a method that has never been used on a human being and is prohibited for the euthanasia of animals,” it said in a statement. “This is Alabama’s second attempt to execute Kenneth Smith, who survived a botched lethal injection just 14 months ago.”
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has likened Smith’s gassing to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Alabama Solicitor-General Edmund LaCour said such claims were speculative.
He told federal judges that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man”.
Elizabeth Sennett was killed by Kenneth Smith after he was hired by her husband for just $1000.
Smith’s horrific crime
In 1988, Elizabeth Sennett’s pastor husband Charles, who was having an affair, found himself deeply in debt and wanted to collect an insurance payout to claw his way out.
He got Smith to kill his wife so he could collect a life insurance payout. Smith was hired indirectly for just US$1000.
Smith repeatedly stabbed Sennett and beat her to death with a fire extinguisher.
Just a week later, her husband took his own life.
The other man convicted in the killing, John Forrest Parker, 42, was executed by lethal injection in June 2010.
Smith was meant to be executed by the same method in 2012 but he survived.
After almost four hours strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility, 90 kilometres northeast of the city of Mobile, officials gave up trying to insert an intravenous line into his arm.
Alabama’s first attempt at nitrogen hypoxia comes after several botched or difficult executions in which the executioners struggled to find veins in the men they were trying to kill.
In 2022, executioners tried for hours to access the veins of Joe Nathan James, ultimately slicing into one of his arms in what is known as a “cutdown” to administer the fatal drugs. Since 2018, three death row prisoners in Alabama, including Smith, have survived execution attempts because of difficulty in inserting intravenous lines.
