This Thursday, Alabama will carry out the first execution in the United States with a new method since 1982. Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, will die from nitrogen hypoxia, that is, breathing only this gas and thus dying due to lack of oxygen.
An appeals court on Wednesday rejected his last appeal, granting his execution despite protests from human rights defenders who claim the never-before-tried method is cruel and unusual, something prohibited by the Constitution.
This execution would come a week after the Justice Department authorized the death penalty in the federal trial of Payton Gendron, 20, for the racially motivated shooting that left 10 Black people dead on May 14, 2022. at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
The president, Democrat Joe Biden, had promised during his 2020 campaign to abolish the death penalty for federal crimes (it is also legal in 27 states, but only they can abolish it).
Kenneth Smith will be executed for nitrogen hypoxia.
After winning the elections and reaching the White House, Trump appointed Merrick Garland as attorney general, and just a few months later he issued a memorandum that temporarily froze all federal executions.
It also contrasted with the last six months of Republican Donald Trump's presidency, in which 13 federal executions were carried out.
Now, a few months before the electoral duel between Biden and Trump could be repeated in November, his views on the death penalty are once again clashing in the campaign.
Federal executions were halted for nearly two decades due to legal disputes earlier this century over the use of drugs that must be administered to cause a condemned man's death.
But in 2019, former Attorney General William Barr, under the Donald Trump Administration, ordered prison officials to resume lethal injections using a single dose of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.
In his last year in office, Trump rushed through a series of regulatory changes at the federal level before the end of his term in January 2021. One of those reforms allowed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to execute prisoners by any of the methods authorized in the state in which they were sentenced, thus circumventing the obstacles to applying lethal injection.
In addition to stopping executions, Garland also ordered in 2021 to review that order as well as the protocol for lethal injection.
No president in more than 120 years had overseen so many federal executions under Trump since he resumed the practice, according to The Associated Press.
The last inmate to be executed, Dustin Higgs, died at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, less than a week before Trump left office.
Now that he is seeking to return to the White House again as a Republican candidate, Trump has proposed on more than one occasion to expand the federal crimes punishable by capital punishment, also applying it, for example, to drug traffickers.
Her rival to become the Republican presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, is also not opposed to the death penalty: in 2015, when she was governor of South Carolina, she advocated applying it against Dylann Roof, then accused of the shooting at a Methodist church in the black community of Charleston left 9 dead.
Roof, who was 22 years old at the time, carried out the attack on the church supposedly with the aim of starting a “race war” and taking revenge on the blacks who were “taking over” the United States, as he said at the time of the massacre.
In December 2016 he was convicted by a federal court of all 33 charges against him, including hate crimes, and in January 2017 he was sentenced to death, as prosecutors from the Department of Justice (then under the Government of the Democrat Barack Obama).