The southern US state of Alabama on Thursday put to death a convicted murderer using nitrogen gas, the first time the controversial method criticized by human rights advocates has been used in the nation.
Kenneth Smith was pronounced dead at 8:25pm, the state attorney general said.
“Justice has been served. Tonight, Kenneth Smith was put to death for the heinous act he committed over 35 years ago,” a statement by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said.
Photo: Reuters
Smith, 58, was on death row for more than three decades after being convicted of the 1988 murder-for-hire of a pastor’s wife.
He was put to death at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, by nitrogen hypoxia, which involved pumping nitrogen gas into a mask, causing him to suffocate.
Media witnesses said that he “began writhing and thrashing for approximately two to four minutes, followed by around five minutes of heavy breathing,” local news outlet AL.com reported.
Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters that it appeared Smith was “holding his breath as long as he could,” and that there was “involuntary movement” and gasping, which was “expected.”
The curtain over the media witness room opened at 7:53pm, AL.com said, with Smith pronounced dead less than 35 minutes later.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, previously said that Alabama was “using an untested, unproven method of execution.”
“It’s never been used before to execute anyone in the United States, or anyone in the world as far as we know,” Maher said.
Smith was subjected to a botched execution attempt in November 2022, when prison officials were unable to set intravenous lines to administer a lethal injection.
Smith’s last words on Thursday were: “Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward,” according to the local CBS affiliate, whose reporter witnessed the execution.
“I am leaving with love, peace and light... I love you. Thank you for supporting me. I love all of you,” Smith said.
The Alabama Department of Corrections said that Smith had a last meal of steak, hash browns and eggs on Thursday morning. The last US execution using gas was in 1999 when a convicted murderer was put to death using hydrogen cyanide gas.
There were 24 executions in the US last year, all of them carried out by lethal injection.
Alabama is one of three US states that have approved the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the UN rights office in Geneva, Switzerland, last week urged Alabama to abandon the plan to execute Smith using what she called a “novel and untested” method.
Shamdasani said it could “amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, under international human rights law.”
While nitrogen gas had never previously been used to execute humans in the US, it is sometimes used to kill animals, but Shamdasani said that even the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends giving large animals a sedative when being euthanized in this manner.
Alabama’s protocol for execution by nitrogen asphyxiation makes no provision for sedation.
The state of Alabama defended the method of execution, claiming it is “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS