The US Supreme Court has rejected the request to prevent Alabama from executing a convicted murderer, Kenneth Smith, who survived a failed lethal injection in 2022, with nitrogen for the first time in the US tomorrow. The judges refused to hear his lawyers’ argument that a second execution attempt – after the plots caused by the failure of the first – would violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Alabama will thus become the first American state to execute an inmate by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen in a mask, a method also approved in Mississippi and Oklahoma, but so far never used and considered unacceptable by veterinarians also as a form of euthanasia for animals.
Kenneth Smith, 59, has been on death row in Holman Prison for 34 years for killing Elizabeth Sennett in 1988 on behalf of her husband, a debt-ridden pastor who wanted to collect the insurance premium and then committed suicide.
At trial the jury voted 11-1 to give the defendant a life sentence, but the judge overturned the decision and imposed the death penalty. The first attempt over a year ago with a lethal injection went badly, turning into a real torture: the operators pierced his hands and arms with the syringe for more than an hour but were unable to find the vein, suspending the execution for the risk of not being able to meet the expected deadlines. Now Alabama is trying again with an alternative method never tried before: nitrogen hypoxia.
The protocol of over 40 pages requires the condemned to wear a mask through which he breathes only nitrogen, thus depriving him of oxygen to the point of suffocation. “I’m afraid that things will go wrong”, confessed the condemned man after the warning of some experts, according to which the planned mask risks leaks causing atrocious suffering.
According to polls, in America there is still a slight majority in favor of the death penalty (81% of Republicans and 32% of Democrats), even if the number of executions has reduced from the peak of 98 in 1999 to 24 last year. Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, is for the abolition of capital punishment but last week his Ministry of Justice announced that it will ask to execute the white supremacist who killed 10 African Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, in the state of New York.
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