And the US Supreme Court said no for the second time.
This Thursday, shortly before 8:00 p.m., the Washington high court reaffirmed a resolution from the previous day in which the postponement of the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith was denied.
Alabama can continue like this tonight with its plans to execute the prisoner with a new method of execution, nitrogen asphyxiation, which they are launching with him.
Smith is sentenced to death for the contract murder of a preacher's wife in the late 1980s.
The southern state is ready to test a new way of killing, criticized as “inhumane” by activists against the death penalty and by the United Nations, with a prisoner who had already been sent to the
gallows
in 2022 to receive a lethal injection.
So, they couldn't find the vein and they couldn't finish him off.
The witnesses, including five journalists who were allowed to attend the execution, the convicted man's lawyers and the victim's two children, got into a van bound for the Holman prison in the town after hearing the judicial decision. by Atmore.
Smith was scheduled to be fitted with an airtight mask by prison officials and then left alone in the room with his confessor, the Reverend Jeff Hood.
From the adjoining room, the warden will then activate the mechanism so that pure nitrogen begins to invade the body of the 58-year-old executed man, until oxygen is removed from his body.
Before, Smith said goodbye to his wife and family and ordered his last meal (steak, hash browns and eggs, topped with meat sauce, ordered from the fast food chain Waffle House).
His lawyers asked the Supreme Court to stop the execution in extremis.
The defense's argument clung to the process.
In a concern shared by doctors, activists against capital punishment and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, there were fears that death would be slow and painful, inhalation of the gas would cause vomiting and that the prisoner would die of drowning, that the gas would not do its job and that Smith would be left in a vegetative state, or that a leak would occur.
Demonstration last Tuesday in front of the Capitol in Montgomery (Alabama) to demand that Governor Kay Ivey stop Smith's execution.
Center, from left, three exonerated death row inmates, Randall Padgent, Gary Drinkard and Ron Wright. Mickey Welsh (AP)
They also objected to a question of deadlines: “Smith was selected for execution despite having been able to completely exhaust the claims raised in a separate procedure that arose from the failed attempt [in 2022],” says the brief presented to the Supreme Court.
“And the State is moving forward despite mounting evidence of increasing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which create a substantial risk that he will vomit during the execution and suffocate, causing him prolonged pain and suffering.”
“A burning nail”
The Alabama attorney general's office dismissed those aspirations, saying Smith was “clutching at straws.”
“The district court found (twice) that Smith's fear was 'speculative,' 'theoretical,' and 'improbable,'” the response said.
And the 11th Circuit agreed that 'there is no evidence that Smith could vomit at the time nitrogen is introduced into the mask.'
The protocol approved by Alabama promised that “after the introduction of nitrogen gas [into the inmate's body], it will be administered for 15 minutes or for the five minutes that pass after the electrocardiogram shows a flat line.
“Whatever happens first.”
Smith, 58, was convicted of participating in the 1989 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett with another man named John Forrest Parker.
They stabbed her and beat her to death with a fireplace poker in exchange for a $1,000 payment promised to each of them by the victim's husband, an adulterous pastor who later called the police and tried to pass off the plot as a violent raid on the family home.
When he was cornered, he committed suicide before being accused.
Alabama killed Parker with a lethal injection in June 2010. A third person involved in the murder, Billy Gray Williams, who was charged with the husband and the other two, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. and died in prison in 2020.
The resort to nitrogen hypoxia is due to the problems that lethal injection has been causing in recent years, a method that was introduced in 1982 in Texas and which in these 42 years has been used to kill 1,377 convicts.
The search for alternatives has intensified in recent times, given that pharmaceutical companies have been refusing, for reasons of corporate image, to sell these drugs to the States, whose stocks have already expired.
Additionally, in 2011, the European Union banned the export of these drugs to the United States.
That is one of the reasons why only five States carried out the death penalty in 2023.
Smith was the third consecutive prisoner who was sent to die in Alabama and later returned to his cell due to the impotence of finding the vein.
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