Skip to main content

USA | Voters divided over nitrogen gas executions

Convicted killer Kenneth Eugene Smith's agonizing death on gurney left people wary of the new punishment, our first-of-its-kind poll reveals

Voters are divided over the use of nitrogen gas in state executions, according to the first poll on the controversial method since it debuted in Alabama last month on convicted killer Kenneth Eugene Smith.

The nationwide DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll of 1,402 US adults offers no clear verdict on the execution that saw Smith breath nitrogen through a mask and die after 22 minutes - during which time he thrashed around and convulsed. 

While 39 percent of respondents said they supported the lethal gassing of Smith, a similar share — 35 percent — said they were opposed. 

Another 26 percent said they were not sure.

Results also varied widely depending on the respondent's gender, age, location and political affiliation. 

Still, the results may help policymakers in the few remaining states that carry out executions, and are considering switching over to nitrogen hypoxia, as it is known.

Smith's execution marked the first time that a new method was used in the US since lethal injection, now the most commonly used method, was introduced in 1982.

Officials in Alabama have called nitrogen 'effective and humane.'

Lawmakers in Ohio are already weighing a switch to nitrogen gas executions.

But those present described it as a 'horror show.'

Smith convulsed and writhed in the tight black straps of his gurney and appeared to be heaving and retching inside the mask, as his wife Deanna started to sob.

The UN's human rights chief Volker Türk called it a regretful and 'novel and untested method of suffocation.'

It 'may amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,' he added.

Public support for the death penalty has steadily eroded in the US for decades, over fears of botched executions, wrongful convictions, and the high share of black men who end up on death row.

Meanwhile, the number of executions has fallen. 

There were 24 executions in the US in 2023, down from the 98 in 1999, according to the Washington, DC-based Death Penalty Information Center. 

Only five states — Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama — executed people last year.

Most states, 29 in all, have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions by executive action.

Ohio, Nevada, and other death penalty states struggle to obtain execution drugs because European drug firms began blocking the use of their products for lethal injections.

Smith himself was set to be executed in 2022, but the lethal injection was called off at the last minute because authorities couldn't connect an IV line.

Our survey shows respondents grappling with a thorny moral question and the troubling accounts of Smith's final minutes at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore on January 25.

Support for nitrogen gas executions was higher in the South and West of the country than in the Northeast and Midwest, our poll showed.

Younger adults were more likely to oppose the method than were those aged 25 and above.

Men were keener on the nitrogen gas death sentence than were women — 44 percent of men supported it, compared to 34 percent of women.

There were also partisan differences — nearly half of Republican voters supported the method, against 35 percent of Democrats.

Following Smith's historic execution, questions have been raised over whether the untested method is a humane solution to America's issues obtaining lethal injection drugs.

Alabama's Attorney General Steve Marshall called Smith's death 'textbook' and has vowed to continue using nitrogen gas. 

Marshall said of the 165 inmates on Alabama's death row, 43 prisoners have opted to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia over lethal injection when their time comes.

'We'll definitely have more nitrogen hypoxia executions in Alabama,' he added.




Ohio, which hasn't executed an inmate since 2018, is weighing re-introducing the death penalty following the first ever use of nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama, Attorney General Dave Yost said.

'Perhaps nitrogen — widely available and easy to manufacture — can break the impasse of unavailability of drugs for lethal injection,' Yost posted on X/Twitter.

'Death row inmates are in greater danger of dying of old age than their sentence.'

Smith was convicted of the murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett, a pastor's wife who was beaten and stabbed repeatedly at her home in the north of the state in 1988.

Smith was one of two men convicted in the killing. The other, John Forrest Parker, was executed in 2010.

Prosecutors said they were each paid $1,000 to kill Sennett on behalf of her pastor husband, who was deeply in debt and wanted to collect on insurance.

The husband, Charles Sennett Sr, killed himself when the investigation focused on him as a suspect, court records show.

Source: Mail Online, James Reinl, February 11, 2024

_____________________________________________________________________










SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY NEWS





Most viewed (Last 7 days)

Violent and sudden. What a firing squad execution looked like through my eyes

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — I’ve now watched through glass and bars as 11 men were put to death at a South Carolina prison. None of the previous 10 prepared me for watching the firing squad death of Brad Sigmon on Friday night. I might now be unique among U.S. reporters: I’ve witnessed three different methods — nine lethal injections and an electric chair execution. I can still hear the thunk of the breaker falling 21 years later. As a journalist you want to ready yourself for an assignment. You research a case. You read about the subject.

South Carolina Executes Brad Sigmond

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection. Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.

Indonesia | Briton faces death penalty for trafficking a kilogram of ecstasy in Bali

A British man is facing the death penalty for allegedly dealing a kilo of MDMA in Bali. Thomas Parker was seen for the first time since his January arrest on Thursday, paraded in front of media in an orange jumpsuit in Denpasar. The 32-year-old could face a firing squad if he is found guilty of trying to push the 1.055kg of Class A drugs police say they recovered in a mail package. MDMA is the main component in the party drug ecstasy. Parker was arrested outside an Airbnb in January, but the case went unreported until authorities showed the Brit shaven and handcuffed at a press conference yesterday.

America’s next killing spree: 10 days, five states, six death-row prisoners set to die

Desolate spectacle of executions begins again under Trump, in landscape of capital punishment as riven as US is as a whole David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza. So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution. For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows.

Todd Willingham: Ex-wife says convicted killer confessed

The former wife of a man whose 2004 execution in Texas has become a source of controversy has said he admitted setting the fire that killed their three daughters during a final prison meeting just weeks before he was put to death, according to a Texas newspaper. Stacy Kuykendall, the ex-wife of Cameron Todd Willingham, said in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published Sunday that Willingham told her he was upset by threats to divorce him after the new year. The fire that killed the couple's three girls was Dec. 23, 1991. Her last threat to divorce him, she said in a statement, occurred the night before the fire. "He said if I didn't have my girls I couldn't leave him and that I could never have Amber or the twins with anyone else but him," according to the statement from Kuykendall to the newspaper. Willingham went to his death proclaiming his innocence. And over the years, she has offered differing accounts. A Tribune investigation in 2004 showed the...

Iranian dissident risked execution by secretly filming luxurious lifestyle of those connected to the regime

Iranians in Tehran illicitly filmed scenes of their capital for Israeli Channel 12 news, an act that constitutes espionage in Iran and can warrant a death penalty. The clips, broadcast on Saturday, showed locals at high-end shopping malls that the videographers said are only financially accessible to those connected to the regime. “I filmed this video with great difficulty and fear, and I said I would send it to the Israeli Channel 12,” said a 44-year-old Iranian who sent footage for the report and went by the alias Ali, speaking in Persian. “I committed a dangerous act. If you just talk to Israelis, you become a spy and they will execute you.”

South Carolina plans to carry out a firing squad execution. Is it safe for witnesses?

South Carolina plans to execute a man by firing squad on March 7, the first such execution in the state and the first in the nation in 15 years. But firearms experts are questioning whether South Carolina's indoor execution setup is safe for the workers who will shoot the prisoner and the people who will watch. Photos released by the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that the state intends to strap the prisoner, Brad Sigmon, to a metal seat in the same small, indoor brick death chamber where South Carolina has executed more than 40 other prisoners by electric chair and lethal injection since 1985.

South Carolina death row inmate chooses firing squad as execution method

Brad Sigmon, 67, is scheduled to be killed on March 7 A South Carolina death row inmate has chosen to be executed by a firing squad, which would make him only the fourth inmate in the U.S. to die by this execution method. Brad Sigmon, 67, who is scheduled to be killed on March 7, informed state officials on Friday that he wishes to die by firing squad rather than by lethal injection or the electric chair, citing, in part, the prolonged suffering the three inmates previously executed in the state had faced when they were killed by lethal injection.

Texas | Court stays execution of Texas man days before he was set to die by lethal injection

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court on Tuesday halted the execution of a man who has spent more than 30 years on death row and had been set to die by lethal injection this week over the killings of six girls and young women found buried in the desert near El Paso. It was the second scheduled execution in the U.S. halted on Tuesday after a federal judge stopped Louisiana’s first death row execution using nitrogen gas, which was to take place next week. In Texas, the order was another reprieve for David Leonard Wood, who in 2009 was about 24 hours away from execution when it was halted over claims he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.

Biden Commuted Their Death Sentences. Now What?

As three men challenge their commutations, others brace for imminent prison transfers and the finality of a life sentence with no chance of release. In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”