An Alabama prisoner is expected to become the first inmate to be executed with a controversial death penalty method.
Hitman Kenneth Eugene Smith was one of two men convicted of capital murder for the murder-for-hire killing of a preacher’s wife, Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett.
Prosecutors said Smith was one of two men who were each paid $1,000 by Charles Sennett, the pastor of the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield, Alabama in 1988, to forcefully take his wife's life, per CBS News.
According to news reports, the reverend asked the death row inmate and his friend, John Parker, to carry out the killing as he was in debt and wanted to collect on insurance. In addition to this, Sennett was reportedly having an extramarital affair at the time.
Elizabeth was stabbed over and over again with a six-inch survival knife and suffered a total of ten stab wounds - eight to her chest and two to her neck - which resulted in her death.
After the gruesome murder, the victim's husband took his own life when investigators began to focus on him as a possible suspect, per court documents, as reported by Daily Mail.
On Friday (August 25), the office of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the state Supreme Court in a court filing to set an execution date for the death row inmate. The filing revealed Alabama plans to put him to death by using nitrogen hypoxia.
The controversial method involves forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, which drains them of oxygen and eventually kills them.
The execution style was first authorized in Alabama in 2018 during a shortage of drugs used to carry out lethal injections, but the state has not employed the method to carry out a death sentence. Other states like Oklahoma and Mississippi have also authorized nitrogen hypoxia as a method but have not utilized it.
Speaking about the heinous crime, Attorney General Marshall said in a statement, cited by WPTZ: "It is a travesty that Kenneth Smith has been able to avoid his death sentence for nearly 35 years after being convicted of the heinous murder-for-hire slaying of an innocent woman, Elizabeth Sennett."
The revelation that the state is prepared to use the infamous method is expected to spark backlash due to the constitutionality of the procedure.
The Equal Justice Initiative - a legal advocacy group that has worked on death penalty issues - said Alabama has a history of "failed and flawed executions and execution attempts" and "experimenting with a never before used method is a terrible idea," as cited by ITV.
"No state in the country has executed a person using nitrogen hypoxia and Alabama is in no position to experiment with a completely unproven and unused method for executing someone," Angie Setzer, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative added.
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