MONTGOMERY, Alabama – A death row prisoner in Alabama is scheduled to be executed this Thursday through the use of nitrogen, making him the first inmate in America to be put to death using this method. Kenneth Smith, a convicted murderer, sought to challenge the constitutionality of the method but his legal bid was unsuccessful, prompting the execution to proceed. Smith’s survival following a botched lethal injection in 2022 led to a review of the state’s death penalty procedures.
The US Supreme Court declined to halt Smith’s execution, denying his request to stay the process and declining to hear his legal challenge on the grounds that a second execution attempt would violate the US Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Smith’s lawyers have urged the Supreme Court to intervene and declared Alabama’s nitrogen gas protocol as “recently released and untested.”
Alabama’s use of nitrogen hypoxia is designed to deprive prisoners of oxygen by placing a mask connected to a cylinder of nitrogen over their face. A state attorney argued that it will be “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.”
The botched execution of Smith marked the third consecutive instance where Alabama officials encountered problems or delays inserting intravenous lines for a scheduled lethal injection, which led to calls off the execution. His lawyers have described the experience as torture and exposed him to severe mental anguish.
Smith was convicted of the 1988 killing of Elizabeth Sennett, who was hired as a hitman along with an accomplice by her husband Charles, a Christian minister who had taken out a large life insurance policy on his wife. The struggle to obtain the necessary drugs used in lethal injection protocols has led states like Alabama to introduce new gas-based execution methods in response to a European ban on pharmaceutical companies selling drugs to be used in executions.