Alabama is ready to pioneer a new means of executing convicts -- by forcing a condemned man to breathe pure nitrogen.
That man is Kenneth Eugene Smith. Now 58, Smith was convicted in 1988 for killing the wife of a preacher -- in a murder-for-hire scheme initiated by that preacher, who hoped to cash in on a life insurance policy and pay off his debts. The victim, Elizabeth Sennett, was found dead in the couple's home on Coon Dog Cemetary Road in rural Colbert County, having been bludgeoned with a fireplace tool and stabbed nine times in what was supposed to look like a home invasion.
Smith and his partner in crime carried out the murder for payments of just $1,000 each. That partner was executed in 2010. The preacher spared everyone the legal hassle: After investigators honed in on him, he confessed to his sons and their families that he'd had an affair and hired the killers -- then immediately strolled to his old pickup truck, sat in the front seat and shot himself, fatally.
An attempt to execute Smith via lethal injection in 2022 was called off when executioners struggled to insert an IV tube into his vein. Now the Alabama attorney general is ready to give it another go, this time using "nitrogen hypoxia." On Friday, AG Steve Marshall asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set a date.
While colorless, odorless nitrogen comprises 78% of the air we breathe daily, breathing 100% nitrogen will theoretically cause the prisoner to first pass out and then die.
“Placed into a pure nitrogen environment, the convict would be unconscious within a minute (possibly even after a breath or two) and would be dead soon after,” Charles Blanke, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, told Fox News. “Its failure rate, that is, cases in which the prisoner survives, would likely be much lower than what we see with current death penalty methods.”
Alabama has yet to provide details on its planned methodology -- for example, whether inmates would be placed in a gas chamber or simply fitted with a special mask. If it's the latter, a good seal is essential to ensure the death isn't prolonged by oxygen in the execution room.
The nitrogen hypoxia method has been on the books in Alabama since 2018. Oklahoma and Mississippi have likewise authorized the method, but none have used it yet. Lethal injections have proven increasingly problematic, owing to shortages of the drugs used in the process.
Those shortages are driven in part by manufacturers not wanting their product used to kill people -- even the most evil ones. In 2011, Hospira, the only domestic producer of one of three lethal-injection ingredients -- sodium thiopental -- stopped making it. In 2012, the FDA made it illegal to import the drug to be used in executions.
Given its novelty, nitrogen hypoxia will be ripe for legal challenges on behalf the condemned. "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," Equal Justice Initiative attorney Angie Setzer told Associated Press.
Alabama doesn't have to prove the humanity of nitrogen execution. "The burden is on the condemned inmate to show that it is torturous rather than the burden being on the state to show that it’s not,” said Richmond University law professor Corinna Barrett Lain in an interview with Scientific American. Lain's choice for most humane method? Firing squad.
Alabama death row inmates are literally lining up to be polished off via nitrogen. In legal action dating back five years, several inmates have sued to be killed that way, rather than lethal injection.
