Alabama wants to be first US state to execute prisoner by making him breathe nitrogen
Representative image.
Alabama is seeking to become the first American state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen. On Friday (August 25), the Alabama attorney general's office asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, the news agency Associated Press reported on Saturday. The court filing indicated the state's plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia.
Smith, 58, was one of the two men convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife. Alabama's attorney general argued it was time to carry out the death sentence.
“It is a travesty that Kenneth Smith has been able to avoid his death sentence for nearly 35 years after being convicted of the heinous murder-for-hire slaying of an innocent woman, Elizabeth Sennett,” Attorney General Steve Marshall said Friday in a statement.
What is nitrogen hypoxia?
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving of oxygen and causing death. The Associated Press report said that while proponents of the new method theorised it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
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Nitrogen hypoxia has been authorised in Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi. But these three states haven't used it to carry out a death sentence. Alabama authorised nitrogen hypoxia in 2018 amid a shortage of drugs used in lethal injections.
The report also said that Alabama had attempted to execute Smith by lethal injection last year, but called off the execution because of problems inserting an IV into his veins. A day after the execution was aborted, Governor Kay Ivey announced a pause on executions to conduct an internal review of lethal injection procedures.
‘A terrible idea’
Slamming Alabama's proposal to execute Smith using nitrogen, the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group said that the state has a history of “failed and flawed executions and execution attempts” and “experimenting with a never before used method is a terrible idea.”
Angie Setzer, a senior lawyer, with the initiative, said, "No state in the country has executed a person using nitrogen hypoxia and Alabama is in no position to experiment with a completely unproven and unused method for executing someone."
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