Lawyers failed to persuade courts to stay the execution, arguing procedure amounted to cruel and unusual punishment
Alabama has carried out the first execution of a death row inmate in the US using nitrogen gas, an untested procedure which the prisoner’s lawyers had argued amounted to a form of cruel and unusual punishment banned under the US constitution.
Kenneth Smith, 58, was pronounced dead at 8.25pm on Thursday evening at an Alabama prison after breathing pure nitrogen gas through a face mask to cause oxygen deprivation.
The execution had been scheduled to begin at 6pm local time at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, but it was delayed as the US supreme court weighed his final appeal. Shortly before 8pm, the court denied that appeal, allowing the execution to proceed.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who along with two other liberal justices dissented, wrote: “Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before. The world is watching.”
Smith’s lawyers had argued that to go ahead with executing him under these untried conditions would violate constitutional protections against cruelty.
The prisoner also unsuccessfully argued that he was being dealt with doubly unlawfully by dint of him having been subjected to an execution procedure once before.
