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Atmore (Alabama)
cnn
—
Alabama executed Kenneth Smith, the first known death row inmate, on Thursday night. die by nitrogen gasmarking the emergence of an entirely new execution method in the United States that experts say could lead to excessive pain or even torture.
Smith, who was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire, had survived the state’s initial attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2022. Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his last-minute appeal to stop the execution. after rejecting the same request on Wednesday.
Smith’s time of death was 8:25 p.m. local time, authorities announced. At a news conference after the execution, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the nitrogen was running for about 15 minutes.
In a joint report, media witnesses said Smith made a lengthy statement before he died, saying, “Tonight Alabama made humanity take a step back” and adding, “I leave with love, peace and light, thank you.” . For supporting me, I love you all.”
Smith appeared conscious for “several minutes of the execution,” and for two minutes afterward, he “shivered and writhed on a stretcher,” according to the media witness report. This was followed by several minutes of deep breathing before his breathing began to slow “until it was no longer noticeable to media witnesses.”
When asked at the news conference about Smith’s trembling during the start of the execution, Hamm said Smith appeared to be holding his breath “as long as he could” and may also have “struggled against his restraints.”
“There was some involuntary movement and some agonal breathing, so that was all expected and is in the side effects that we have seen and investigated with nitrogen hypoxia,” Hamm added. “So nothing was out of the ordinary from what we expected.” Agonal breathing is usually described as a type of gasping seen in people who are dying.
Another witness, Smith’s spiritual advisor, who had previously expressed concern that the method could be inhumane, described the death in more graphic terms, saying it was “the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Blacksmith, wearing a mask through which the nitrogen was administered, convulsed when the gas was turned on, “jumped on the gurney” repeatedly, gasped and gasped, the Rev. Jeff Hood said.
“Tonight incredible evil was unleashed,” Hood said.
One of the victim’s children, Elizabeth Sennett, said Smith’s death brought justice for her mother.
“Nothing happened here today that would make mom come back. Nothing,” Mike Sennett said at the press conference. “We are glad this day is over. “We have forgiven the three people involved in this case years ago.”
“Kenneth Smith made some bad decisions 35 years ago and his debt was paid tonight,” he said.
In a statement, Smith’s legal team said they were “deeply saddened” by his death, adding that he had discovered and “sincerely practiced his faith,” had become sober and helped other inmates achieve sobriety, and had earned an associate degree.
“Nothing can undo the tragic consequences of the actions for which he was convicted, including the pain of Sennett’s family and friends. “Kenny’s life, however, must be considered in its full context,” the statement added.
Little is known about how the execution method, known as nitrogen hypoxia, was carried out because the protocol released by the state has redactions that experts say protect key details from public scrutiny. The state, in court records, said the redactions were made to maintain safety and believes death by nitrogen gas is “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
But Smith and his team were skeptical. “The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse,” the inmate and his spiritual advisor, Hood, said at midday Thursday in a joint statement. “Our prayer is that people do not turn their heads. “We simply cannot normalize suffocating each other.”
Elizabeth Sennett’s children told CNN on Thursday that they felt it was time for Smith’s sentence to be carried out, adding that they believed their mother had been forgotten due to the new method of execution.
“It seems like a lot of the attention today is on Smith and his nitrogen process, whatever,” Mike Sennett said. “And that bothers us a little bit.”
“What’s happening is overshadowing what really happened,” said his brother, Chuck Sennett. “He must pay the price for what he did to our mother,” who she must remember “as a loving and attentive woman.” The two brothers were in their twenties when their mother was killed.
Before his execution, Smith accepted a final meal of steak, French fries and eggs, according to information released by the Alabama Department of Corrections.
The US Supreme Court refused to intervene for the first time in Smith’s case on Wednesday after his lawyers tried to argue that a second execution attempt would violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
A separate federal appeals court ruling issued Wednesday afternoon also declined to halt the execution. Smith’s team appealed again Thursday morning to the Supreme Court.
State officials welcomed the high court’s rejection of Smith’s earlier request, framing it as an “attempt to prevent the State from executing him by any means,” Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.
Alabama “remains confident that the long-awaited execution and justice will proceed as planned,” he said.
Still, Smith’s defenders and the state’s critics feared that the nitrogen gas execution could go wrong, pointing to its novel nature, questions surrounding its hidden protocol and Alabama’s recent struggles to carry out lethal injections.
In 2022 alone, the state carried out or attempted three executions in a row that critics deemed “failures,” meaning they deviated from established protocol. In two of the cases, inmates, including Smith, survived as officials. executions were suspended because they were unable to establish an intravenous line to administer the lethal drugs before the death sentences expired.
Alabama on Thursday used nitrogen hypoxia, a method it adopted in 2018. It is one of three states, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi, that have approved the use of nitrogen for executions, although no other state has used it and only Alabama It has a protocol.
In theory, the method consists of replacing the air a prisoner breathes with 100% nitrogen, depriving the body of oxygen. Proponents maintain that the process will be painless, citing nitrogen’s role in fatal industrial accidents or suicides.
Others are skeptical, including a group of United Nations experts who this month expressed concern that an execution with nitrogen gas “would result in a painful and humiliating death,” without scientific evidence to the contrary.
“It’s crazy, absolutely crazy,” Smith’s spiritual advisor said before the execution.
“The process, obviously, is designed to execute Kenneth Smith,” Hood told CNN. “But the way they construct this, the way they do it, the way they are silent, the way they withhold information, yes, it is incredibly worrying. And it should be incredibly worrying for everyone in the room.”
Aside from the method of execution, Smith’s life should be spared because of the previous failed attempt to execute him, the founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that opposes excessive criminal punishment and advocates for those sentenced to death. The group has assisted Smith’s attorneys in the case.
“Since then, we have been arguing that the state does not have the jurisdiction to carry out these executions,” Bryan Stevenson told CNN on Thursday. “They changed the method and now they say they have the ability to carry out a method that has not been tested and has never been used before.”
Smith was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Sennett, whose husband, Charles, was having an affair and had taken out an insurance policy for his wife, according to court records.
Charles Sennett recruited a man who recruited two others, including Smith, and agreed to pay each of them $1,000 to kill his wife and make it look like she had died in a robbery, records show. The men carried out the murder as planned in March 1988, with Smith taking from Sennett’s home a VCR that he kept in his own home.
Charles Sennett committed suicide a week after the murder, records show, as the investigation focused on him. Smith was eventually arrested after authorities, based on an anonymous tip, searched his home and found the video player.
Smith was convicted and sentenced to death, but a appeals court overturned the initial result and ordered a new trial. He was again found guilty at the retrial, but this time his jury voted 11-1 in favor of a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
However, the judge in Smith’s second trial essentially vetoed the jury’s vote and sentenced the defendant to death, a practice known as judicial nullification that has since been repealed in Alabama.
CNN’s Devan Cole, Chris Youd, Olivia LaBorde, Jamiel Lynch and Alta Spells contributed to this report.
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