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Kenneth Smith The 58-year-old will become the first prisoner in the United States to be executed by nitrogen gas asphyxiation. This is the rare prisoner who has already
Kenneth Smith The 58-year-old will become the first prisoner in the United States to be executed by nitrogen gas asphyxiation.
This is the rare prisoner who has already survived an attempted execution after being convicted of contract killing in 1988.
Alabama authorities canceled his execution in November 2022. lethal injection after hours of trying to insert an IV needle into his body.
Smith is on death row for the murder of Elizabeth Sennett at the request of her husband Charles Sennett, who He intended to receive compensation. Smith and his accomplice John Forrest Parker each received $1,000.
Sennett committed suicide a week after the murder when he realized that authorities considered him a suspect, and Parker was also sentenced to death and was sentenced to death. performed in 2010 with lethal injection.
New alternative fuels debate
This Thursday, Alabama is preparing to carry out its first known judicial execution through this process, a new method the state hopes to promote as a viable and simpler alternative to lethal injections.
However, the method nitrogen hypoxiawhich came under fire because Alabama withheld key details about how it works.
This was stated by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani. “seriously concerned” new method and called on the state of Alabama to “cease the execution” and “refrain from carrying out any other executions of this type.”
Amnesty International, for its part, warned that “this new, untested method could be extremely painful” for the prisoner, “thus violating international human rights treaties that the United States has ratified.”
Amid international criticism, The US Supreme Court gave the green light to the first performance with nitrogen gas in the country.
The state of Alabama, which has been working on a protocol for killings using this new method of nitrogen asphyxiation for years, defends in court that it is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.”
Prisoners will be fitted with a mask that will replace oxygen with nitrogen gas, theoretically causing death within minutes.
But that argument has not convinced Smith’s defense, which, after a federal judge cleared the execution last week, filed appeals to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, arguing that his client is a guinea pig.
Unlike the Supreme Court of Appeal haven’t spoken yet.
In execution cases, magistrates usually do not rule one way or the other until the last minute or even after expected execution time.
Alabama is the first state to develop an alternative to lethal injections, the method used by most in recent decades, given difficulties in recent years in obtaining drugs due to the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to allow their use for this purpose.
In addition, complications arising from several executions (some in Alabama) raised questions. inhumane method and which has been the subject of legal disputes for many years.
Source: Aristegui Noticias
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