Alabama: The White House expressed its deepest worries after the US state of Alabama used nitrogen gas to execute a murder convict. The state using the untested method was also condemned by the United Nations and the European Union, Agence France-Presse reported.
The 58-year-old murder convict Kenneth Smith was put to death on Thursday by pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask he was made to wear.
White House said that the use of nitrogen gas was deeply troubling to it. When executions in the United States are conducted with lethal injection, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Mississippi gave consent to the use of nitrogen gas.
On Friday, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall defended the state’s decision to use nitrogen on Smith. He said that the execution was carried out in a professional manner. He added that Alabama will have more executions in this manner.
As per local news outlets, Smith struggled for two to four minutes, writhing and thrashing, after nitrogen gas started pumping.
UN Human Rights expressed its concern over the manner in which Smith was executed. It said that the method of suffocation by nitrogen gas is “torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
A spokesperson for the UN rights office, Ravina Shamdasani, said that rather than resorting to such methods of execution, the practice of execution itself must be stopped. Execution is an anachronism that doesn’t belong to the 21st century, Shamdasani said.
Smith was sentenced to death in a murder-for-hire case in 1988 of Elizabeth Sennet. Smith and his accomplice John Parker, who was executed in 2010 using lethal injection, were paid $1,000 each to kill Sennet, as per the case. In 2022, Smith was subjected to lethal injection but failed since officials couldn’t set intravenous lines to administer the injection.