New York – Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first American death row inmate killed using a nitrogen mask. He was executed Thursday evening at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. New chapter in a practice that continues to assimilate the United States to the most backward countries in the world, even if executions have significantly decreased in recent years.
At 10 a.m. Smith ate his last meal, steak, potatoes and eggs, bought from a Waffle House fast food restaurant near the prison. From then on he remained fasting, because the executioner feared that he would vomit during the execution. He met his family together with his spiritual advisor, Jeff Hood, for a final farewell. “There were a lot of tears shed,” Hood said, adding that “Kenneth is terrified of the torture he might suffer.”
The execution was scheduled for 6 pm, but the latest legal appeals, all rejected, delayed it. Strapped to the gurney, just before the executioner placed the nitrogen mask over his face, Smith made his final statement: “Tonight Alabama made humanity take a step back. I leave with love , peace and light, thank you for supporting me, I love you all.”
At that point the gas that was supposed to deprive him of oxygen began to fill the mask. Smith, according to witness accounts, remained conscious for “several minutes into the execution” and for the next two minutes was “trembling and writhing on a gurney.” Then followed several minutes of deep breathing, before his breathing began to slow, “until he was no longer perceptible to media witnesses.” At 8:25 in the evening he was declared dead.
When prison authorities were asked at a press conference why Smith was trembling as the execution began, the response was that he appeared to be holding his breath “for as long as he could” and may have been “struggling against his restraints.” So “there were some involuntary movements and some agonal breathing. It was all expected in the side effects that we saw and studied on nitrogen hypoxia. Nothing was out of the ordinary compared to what we expected.”
Fifteen minutes of agony are therefore considered the norm.
Smith was 58 years old and had been sentenced to death for the murder of a woman, Elizabeth Sennett, committed in 1988. The victim’s husband, a Protestant minister named Charles, had hired Kenneth and two other accomplices, paying them a thousand dollars each to kill her. His aim was to collect his wife’s life insurance money, because he was suffocated by debt. The three murderers had attacked her, stabbing her eleven times.
At Smith’s trial he was found guilty, but the jury sentenced him to life in prison. However, the judge did not accept the verdict, transforming it into capital punishment. The victim’s children had called for the killers to be executed.
The execution had been scheduled for the first time in 2022, with lethal injection, but the executioner was unable to find a vein to administer it and therefore it was cancelled. So the local authorities had decided to change the method, switching to the nitrogen mask, a method used in some cases of assisted suicide in Europe.
Smith’s lawyers filed several appeals, arguing that it was an “unusual and cruel” punishment, therefore prohibited by law. They also denounced the risk of a slow and painful death, because the mask was a one-size-fits-all and might not cause immediate death. There was also the risk that the condemned person would suffer a stroke, become incapacitated or in a coma, but without dying.
The Community of Sant’Egidio had also requested grace. However, no state or federal court, including the Washington Supreme Court, has accepted the appeals. The last ones were presented a few hours before the execution, but they did not help to stop it.
In 2023, 24 inmates were executed, in five states: Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Missouri and Alabama. There are currently around 2,400 inmates on death row, but convictions and executions have been decreasing for twenty years, although there was an increase in 2023. Support for the practice is declining across the country, with the sole exception of the more conservative southeastern states. When he was president, Donald Trump resumed federal executions, but Biden reinstated the moratorium. However, few individual states continue executions, perpetuating a concept of justice that assimilates the USA to many countries that Washington then condemns for human rights violations.