It’s been two months since I spoke to Kenneth Smith, the death row inmate who—by the time you read this—may have breathed his last.
He told me at the time that he was “absolutely terrified” at the prospect. Not surprising, you might say, but ‘Kenny’ – as he is known to the staff who have been his prison guards for the past 35 years – had a very special reason to fear his final moments.
In November 2022, after three men spent 90 minutes trying to kill him with a cocktail of drugs before giving up after failing to puncture a vein, one of his would-be executioners tried to offer him comfort by reassuring him argue that lethal injection was much better. way to go than to be gassed.
“He tried to comfort me and we got into a bizarre conversation,” Smith, 58, said. “He said, ‘Oh, you know, man, if you gotta go, this is the way.’ Lethal injection, he said, is painless. And he said gas is asphyxiation and no one knows what’s going to happen. I couldn’t get that out of my head.’
Murderer Kenneth Smith spent 33 years on death row for his role in a 1988 murder
Kenneth Smith’s victim Elizabeth Sennett, pictured with her husband Charles, who paid two men $1,000 each to kill his wife so he could collect her life insurance
But just a week later, the state of Alabama announced it would try to kill Smith this way, setting him on a bleak path to becoming the first person in the US to be executed with a new, untested gassing method known stands for ‘nitrogen’. hypoxia’.
This involves putting a face mask on the victim and making him breathe pure nitrogen until he suffocates.
Alabama has hailed it as “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man,” claiming it would take a few seconds to knock Smith unconscious and five to 15 minutes to kill him.
Several states that still maintain the death penalty list nitrogen hypoxia as a permitted method of execution, but have never used it. She and Alabama will observe Smith’s fate as they search for an alternative to lethal injections.
But opponents of executions, including the UN, have said the method amounts to human experimentation because no one can know whether the process – sometimes used to kill pigs but banned by veterinarians as a method of killing other mammals – is painless.
Some medical experts believe this could result in a range of catastrophic accidents, from violent convulsions to surviving in a vegetative state. Smith’s lawyers claimed the method would violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” and filed a last-minute appeal. But on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court and a lower appeals court declined to block the execution. Amid last-ditch efforts to save him, a 30-hour period during which Smith was to be executed with nitrogen was due to end at 6am local time (1200 GMT) today.
Smith is incarcerated at the William C Holman Correctional Facility. The father of four was convicted of the 1988 murder of 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett in Sheffield, Alabama.
He and another man, John Parker, were each given $1,000 by her husband Charles, a local church pastor who was having an affair with another woman, to kill his wife so he could collect the insurance money. Smith admitted that he took part in her attack but denied that he intended to kill her.
After decades of legal wrangling, he was scheduled to be executed on November 17, 2022. Smith spent much of that day with his family and friends in Holman’s visiting area, while his lawyers launched eleventh-hour legal appeals.
He had one last meal – his choice of fried catfish and shrimp – before being visited for the last time by a local lay preacher. Just before 8 p.m., guards streamed onto his “death row” and took him to the nearby execution chamber, even though legal arguments were ongoing.
Elizabeth Sennett was 45 when she was murdered by Smith and an accomplice in 1988
Convicted prisoners are strapped to a stretcher in the prison’s death chamber
Smith is imprisoned at the William C Holman Correctional Facility, deep in the dense swamp forests of central Alabama
He was then strapped to a stretcher by his arms, legs and feet. At 10 p.m. – 23 minutes before the Supreme Court approved his execution – three men dressed in blue, red and green scrubs entered with a medical trolley.
They injected him with midazolam hydrochloride, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which would theoretically sedate him and then stop his heart.
‘Blue Scrubs’ and ‘Green Scrubs’ both failed to find a usable vein, and the executioners asked for the stretcher to be tilted so that his feet were pointing upwards. Everyone except his guards went outside, leaving Smith lying there for several minutes.
When the IV team returned, “Red Scrubs” stuck a huge needle under Smith’s collarbone. Smith remembers being jabbed repeatedly with the needle, causing so much pain that he could “barely breathe.”
He has since compared the experience to running it through a sewing machine. He told the Mail: ‘By the end I wasn’t thinking about prayer anymore – I was thinking, ‘Please get that off my chest.’
But eventually they stopped and again everyone left except the guards, leaving Smith strapped to the stretcher. Little did he know that they would no longer have time to carry out the death sentence before midnight.
With his ordeal over, the IV team’s attitude changed: Green Scrubs offered him some water, held his hand, and told him he would pray for him.
Why had he survived, he asked. “Legal matters,” said Green Scrubs, who then expressed his extraordinary assurance about the benefits of lethal injection instead of nitrogen.
The identities and qualifications of the potential executioners have never been revealed, although senior officials insisted that some attendees had “medical” training.
When we spoke about the first anniversary of his botched execution, he said to me, “Those guards who carried me around… I saw them every day, Tom.”
Given nitrogen hypoxia’s potential to transform America’s beleaguered death penalty system, Kenneth Smith will be far from alone in wanting to know whether his fate will be painless or unbearable.