Kenneth Smith executed by nitrogen gas

The UN’s protests were in vain.

During the night of Friday, Kenneth Smith, 58, was executed with nitrogen gas in the United States.

A final appeal was rejected by the country’s highest court hours before.

Shortly after 03:30, Swedish time, the authorities in Alabama announced that the debated execution had been carried out at the Holman prison in the city of Atmore.

Kenneth Smith died of acute oxygen deprivation after being strapped to a gurney and breathing in nitrogen gas through a mask, a new and previously untested execution method in the United States.

A prison spokesman told the Associated Press that Smith met with family members and his spiritual advisor, the Reverend Jeff Hood, before he was taken to his execution.

The last meal, according to Hood, was a t-bone steak served with raw crab, toast, eggs and a barbecue sauce.

– He is terrified of the torture that is to come. But he is also calm. “One of the things he told me is that he’s finally getting out,” Jeff Hood said after the meeting.

Convicted of contract murder

Kenneth Smith, 58, was sentenced to death for murdering a woman for pay in 1988. The perpetrator was her husband, a preacher who took his own life when investigators tracked him down, writes CNN.

Kenneth Smith was scheduled to be executed as early as November 2022, but staff at the Alabama prison then failed to give him a lethal injection. They did not find a suitable vein for the syringe before the deadline expired.

On Wednesday, both the US Supreme Court and a federal appeals court gave the green light to the execution.

Kenneth Smith’s lawyers argued in vain that their client was “being used as a guinea pig in an unsafe experiment”.

Three judges disagree

Hours before Kenneth Smith was killed, HD rejected yet another last-minute appeal, AP writes. Three of those justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — differed in the decision. All three are appointed by Democratic presidents.

“After failing to kill Smith on the first try, Alabama has chosen him as its test animal to test a method of execution never used before. The world is watching,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

The UN human rights agency OHCHR criticized the plans just over a week ago.

“Asphyxiation by nitrogen gas may constitute torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under international human rights law,” spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani wrote in a press release.

Only Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi have approved the method, but tonight’s execution of Kenneth Smith was the first.

According to the AP, it was also the first time since 1982 that a new execution method was introduced in the United States. Then became Charlie Brooks in Texas the first to be killed by a poison injection.