Witness reports indicate that, just as Kenny Smith feared, the State’s experiment with nitrogen suffocation did not go as the State predicted. AL.com reported:
Witnesses saw Smith struggle as the gas began flowing into the mask that covered his entire face. He began writhing and thrashing between two and four minutes and was followed by around five minutes of heavy breathing.
At 8:07 p.m. a correctional officer leaned over the gurney and closely examined Smith’s face before walking back to his position against the wall.
Mr. Smith was not pronounced dead until nearly 20 minutes later, at 8:25 pm.
Alabama’s protocol called for Mr. Smith to be strapped so tightly to a gurney that he could not even move his head, but witnesses report that he pulled against the restraints. It is unclear at this hour what he experienced when nitrogen gas pumped through a mask that covered his nose and mouth displaced all of his oxygen, causing hypoxia and, ultimately, death.
But it is clear that, for the last 14 months, the State of Alabama subjected Kenny Smith to the trauma of facing a second execution date, making him the only person in 75 years—and only the second in U.S. history—to suffer a second execution after a previous failed attempt.
The State of Alabama told Mr. Smith for weeks that he was going to die on November 17, 2022.
On that date, Mr. Smith was given his last meal and last words, strapped to a gurney for over an hour and tortured as prison staff jabbed him with needles, penetrating his muscles and causing severe pain, and then attempted a central line procedure.
Throughout this hours-long process, Mr. Smith was terrified and writhing in agony. Just before midnight, the execution team suddenly stopped sticking him with needles and returned him to his cell.
Mr. Smith thought that every minute during that horrific night would be his last. In several important respects, Mr. Smith experienced what was effectively a “mock execution” that resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mr. Smith’s nightmares, nausea, and other trauma symptoms were exacerbated when the State announced it would put him through this ordeal a second time—but using a completely experimental and terrifying method that would force him to breathe nitrogen gas until he suffocated to death.
Alabama not only proceeded with a new nitrogen gas protocol that had never been tested and despite real doubts about its constitutionality, but it compounded its cruelty when, as Circuit Judge Jill Pryor wrote in her dissent from the Eleventh Circuit’s order denying a stay of execution, it specifically “chose[] this condemned person, this protocol, and this moment.”
“[E]ven though Mr. Smith is suffering mentally and physically from the posttraumatic stress Alabama caused when it botched its first attempt to execute him in 2022,” she wrote, the State of Alabama decided that Mr. Smith would be “escorted by his executioners to the same execution chamber that was previously used for the first attempted execution” and “strapped to a gurney, the same one that held him for hours as he endured excruciating pain just over a year ago.”
While Mr. Smith did not survive to report what pain he experienced this time, there is an undeniable record of the agonizing terror he suffered over the last year.
And as Mr. Smith’s first failed execution attempt—one of four executions that Alabama botched in four years—amply demonstrates, a single “successful” execution by nitrogen suffocation provides no basis for believing that Alabama can reliably carry out another.
Source: eji.org, Staff, January 25, 2024
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