There was no mercy or clemency for Kenneth Smith, the murder convict whose life was spared by a jury, sentencing him to life in prison, a verdict that a judge ignored (this is prohibited today) and imposed the maximum sentence. .
After Alabama failed in its execution with a lethal injection in November 2022, this Thursday, and after the authorization of the Supreme Court, Smith went to the other world using a novel method, never applied, such as the use of nitrogen, which that puts the United States back at the forefront of the debate on capital punishment by crossing a new frontier. Nitrogen asphyxiation is a technique that veterinarians reject, for ethical reasons, even for the euthanasia of mammals in general.
The process lasted 22 minutes in the execution chamber and he was declared dead at 8:25 a.m. on Thursday night (3:25 a.m. on Friday in Spain), reported the state's prisons commissioner, John Q. .Hamm, after the inmate breathed pure nitrogen through a mask that caused him to suffocate due to oxygen deprivation.
This is the first time that this resource has been used in the United States and the first method that has been introduced since 1982, when lethal injections were used, currently in crisis due to the succession of failed attempts, as this same inmate experienced. .
Throughout the execution, Smith appeared conscious for several minutes once the gas reached the mask. For at least a couple of minutes he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney, sometimes straining at the restraints. This was followed by a period of heavy breathing, until his breath was no longer perceptible,” said those present. Hamm maintained that the inmate tried to hold his breath for as long as possible and minimized body movements: “Nothing has gone out of what we expected.”
“Tonight Alabama makes humanity take a step back,” Smith noted in his final words. “I leave with love, peace and light,” he said. He made the sign of love with his hands, addressing members of his family who attended as witnesses. “Thank you for your support, love, love for all of you,” he insisted.
Once her death was confirmed, the state governor, Republican Kay Ivey, stressed that justice had been done for the death of Elizabeth Sennett, who was 45 years old in 1988. “After more than thirty years of attempt after attempt to cheat the system, Smith has had the answer to her horrendous crimes. “I pray that Elizabeth Sennet’s family can heal her wound after all these years of suffering from this great loss,” Ivey said in a statement.
The pain is even greater because the crime was plotted by Elizabeth's husband, the preacher Charles Sennett, who hired Smith and his crony John Forrest Parker, whom he paid $1,000 apiece, to kill his wife and collect the money. insurance policy. Smith was the last one alive. Charles committed suicide when he was surrounded by investigators and Parker was executed in 2010. A third person involved received a life sentence and died in prison in 2020.
Many people demonstrated in cities in Alabama and outside the Holman prison in Utmore. “Stop experimental executions” signs abounded. It didn't help at all.
There were many doubts regarding the application of gas. Alabama authorities proclaimed the method “the most humane” ever tried, but critics called it cruel and experimental. Detractors consider it an abomination, even veterinarians advise against it for animals.
Some states are in the process of searching for solutions, since several lethal injections, the most common method, have failed or shown deficiencies and due to the difficulty in finding the necessary drugs. Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma approved the use of nitrogen in 2018. Only Alabama developed the protocol and opted for its use, amid protests over the suffering that can be caused to the condemned.
With Governor Ivey's clemency ruled out, Smith spent the final day waiting for a possible miracle in the form of a Supreme Court order blocking the execution at the last minute. The highest US court, with the opinion of the three liberal judges in favor of the pause and the decisive vote of the six conservatives, gave the green light to the execution at the end of the afternoon this Thursday. The members of the majority did not issue any type of statement.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three dissenters, wrote a harsh dissenting opinion. “Unable to kill Smith on the first attempt, Alabama selected him as a guinea pig to experiment with an execution method never tried before,” she stressed. “The world is watching,” she added.
The other two progressive justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said a pause should be imposed to give the court time to examine the exceptional circumstances surrounding Alabama's new execution method. “The state's protocols have recently been developed and are even under review to prevent Smith from choking on his own vomit,” Kagan wrote.
This inmate already knew all the rituals once he leaves death row and enters the execution chamber. In November 2022, he was tied to a stretcher for four hours, stitched up with punctures, due to the inability to find an intravenous line to connect him with the lethal injection. He revived, just as had happened to another inmate a few weeks earlier, also in Alabama, and for the same problem.
In the hours before his execution, Smith met with members of his family and his spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, a prison spokesman said. At his last meal, at 10 a.m., he was given steak, hash browns, toast and eggs with gravy, Hood explained.
“He is scared by the torture he is going to suffer, but he is also at peace. One of the things he has told me is that he is finally leaving,” the spiritual advisor said in a statement issued before the execution. “The eyes of the world are on this imminent moral Apocalypse, I hope people do not look the other way,” he insisted.
His lawyers filed a last-minute appeal in which they argued that Smith was used as a guinea pig when he was killed by nitrogen hypoxia, something that had never been proven and that could result in a cruel death and torture, contrary to what the law establishes. Constitution. They repeated that Alabama's prison system was not well prepared and that the mask's design could allow oxygen in and prolong the process, causing nausea and vomiting.
A federal appeals court in Alabama ruled on Wednesday that there was evidence that this method would cause him special suffering, so they denied the request. The Supreme Court did not heed that plea either, nor did it just 48 hours earlier by denying that, the fact that they failed to execute him 14 months ago with a lethal injection, trying again would be an unusual and excessive punishment, also beyond constitutional principles. .
In her statement after the execution, the governor reiterated that the execution had been legally carried out “by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously required by Smith as an alternative to lethal injection,” she explained. “He finally got what he asked for and this case is over,” she said.
In the history of capital punishment in the United States, Smith is only the second to survive an execution and then be executed again, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). There is a precedent in the 1940s, a survivor of the electric chair, whom the Supreme Court authorized to execute again.
Smith's attorneys expressed concern that their client had begun vomiting repeatedly on the eve of the reckoning. “Possibly as a result of post-traumatic stress after the previous failed attempt,” they stressed.
But the state attorney discredited Smith's claim, who recalled that he requested the nitrogen solution thinking that this step would not be taken, by emphasizing that there was no confirmation of the vomiting. As a precaution, they decided to give him the last meal in the morning and then give him fluids during the day to limit the risk of him choking during the execution. “This is the most painless method, much better than the one Smith applied to Elizabeth Sennett 36 years ago,” he said.
Against this, the United States Veterinary Medical Association wrote a guide for euthanasia in 2020 in which it maintained that nitrogen hypoxia is not acceptable with the vast majority of mammals because the lack of oxygen “is distressing.”
United Nations experts expressed alarm. “We are concerned that nitrogen hypoxia will result in a painful and humiliating death,” they said. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also called on Alabama to block the execution because “it could constitute torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under international human rights law.”
Michael Sennett, son of the murdered woman, downplayed the method. “I don't care how he leaves, he should have left a long time ago,” he stressed in a statement to a local channel. “He has paid for what he did. And to those people who are out there (protesters), who say she didn't need to suffer this way, well, he didn't ask my mother what she suffered, they just did it, they stabbed her multiple times.”
