Alabama faced widespread condemnation after the state executed Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday evening using nitrogen gas, the first time the method has been used in the United States to kill someone.
Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8pm local time.
Smith was fitted with a face mask. He used sign language to say “I love you” to witnesses in the viewing room, and in his final statement he said: “Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward.”
After the nitrogen gas began flowing, Smith convulsed on the gurney for several minutes. The state had previously said the nitrogen gas would cause Smith to lose consciousness in seconds and die within minutes, according to the Associated Press.
“I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist who witnessed the execution, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, was in the death chamber when Smith was killed. In a tearful television interview with CNN, he said Smith “popped up on the gurney over and over and over again. He shook the whole gurney.”
“I have never, ever seen anything like that,” he said. “That was torture.”
“I could see the corrections officers that were in there,” he added. “I think they were very surprised that this didn’t go smoother.”
Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for Human Rights, said on Friday: “I deeply regret the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama despite serious concerns this novel and untested method of suffocation by nitrogen gas may amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Four independent UN monitors had called on Alabama to call off the execution earlier this month.
The EU diplomatic service also condemned the execution. “According to leading experts, this method is a particularly cruel and unusual punishment, in addition to the fact that the inmate was already subjected to a failed execution attempt in November 2022,” it said in a statement.
John Hamm, the commissioner of Alabama’s department of corrections, said during a press conference on Thursday there was “nothing out of the ordinary” about Smith’s execution. “It appeared Smith held his breath for as long as he could, and struggled against his restraints,” he said. “This was expected.”
Maya Foa, joint executive director of the international human rights group Reprieve, said Smith’s execution was “torture” and disputed the claim that the execution was successful.
“Alabama is predictably claiming that this dangerous experimental method is now ‘proven’. Executing states are constantly looking for ways to pretend that executions are medical and modern, not brutal and violent,” she said in a statement.
“They said lethal injection was humane – that was a lie. They’re claiming this execution was humane, and that is a lie, too.”
Joel Zivot, an expert on execution at the Emory University School of Medicine, said the accounts of Smith’s death were what he anticipated. “He struggled to stay alive as his brain became deprived of oxygen. It is possible he had a seizure at some point and his death was of course slow and agonizing,” he said.
“The Alabama department of corrections claims the execution went exactly as they anticipated. Therefore, it can only be concluded that they intended to torture him to death. Further, the use of torture in execution is the definition of cruelty.”
Smith was convicted in the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett. Sennett’s husband, a pastor, allegedly paid Smith and another man $1,000 each to kill her.
A jury voted 11-1 to sentence Smith to life in prison, but the judge overseeing the case overrode that decision and sentenced him to death. That practice, called judicial override, has since been eliminated in all 50 US states.
Some of Sennett’s relatives attended the execution and told reporters they had forgiven Smith.
“Nothing that happened here today is going to bring Mom back,” sais Mike Sennett, Elizabeth Sennett’s son. “It’s a bittersweet day, we’re not going to be jumping around, hooping and hollering, hooraying and all that, that’s not us. We’re glad this day is over.”
Bryan Stevenson, a well-known lawyer who has fought against the death penalty and founded the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, also condemned Smith’s execution.
“The threshold question of the death penalty isn’t whether someone deserves to die for the crime they’ve committed. The threshold question is: do we deserve to kill?” he said in an interview on CNN.
“In our society, we don’t rape people who rape. We don’t torture people who torture. That’s because we believe that the integrity of the law means we have to do better than the worst offenders in our society.”
Alabama previously tried to execute Smith by lethal injection in November of 2022. But after strapping him to a gurney for four hours, they called it off after they were unable to find a vein.
Kay Ivey, Alabama’s Republican governor, said the execution was “lawfully carried out by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously requested by Mr Smith as an alternative to lethal injection”.
“After more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system, Mr Smith has answered for his horrendous crimes,” she said in a statement.
The US supreme court also rejected a last-minute request to halt Smith’s execution on Thursday, with the court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – all dissenting.
Sotomayor said nitrogen hypoxia was “untested” and Smith was being used as a “guinea pig”. “With deep sadness, but commitment to the eighth amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
Smith spoke to the Guardian days before he was executed. He described suffering from PTSD after the first failed execution attempt and was “sick to his stomach” most days. He said he was not prepared to return to the death chamber. “I am not ready for that. Not in no kind of way. I’m just not ready, brother,” he said.
He also said he feared other states would begin to kill people using nitrogen gas. “I fear that it will be successful, and you will have a nitrogen system coming to your state very soon,” he said.
