A controversial new death penalty method that will be used on an Alabama prisoner has been described as "unprecedented and untested".
As previously reported, Alabama is expected to become the first state to execute a prisoner by using nitrogen hypoxia - a method that involves forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, which drains their body of oxygen and eventually kills them.
This was disclosed on Friday (August 25) after the office of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the state Supreme Court in a court filing to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58.
The decision to introduce this execution style was first authorized in Alabama - as well as Oklahoma and Mississippi - 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 as of yet.
The new approach also comes after the state botched three executions in 2022, including Smith's own last November. The Associated Press reported that during the execution, state officials struggled to access a vein for the lethal injection until they found one of his two vital intravenous lines.
According to Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm, executioners couldn’t successfully locate the death row inmate's second line despite trying "several locations." By the time the death warrant expired at midnight, Smith was left on the gurney for hours, unaware that his execution had failed.
"At some point before midnight, Defendants [ADOC] stopped their attempted execution of Mr. Smith, but not before inflicting grave physical pain and emotional trauma, the likes of which the human brain is not able to process," Smith’s attorneys alleged in a motion against ADOC.
While the state is now determined to get it right by using nitrogen hypoxia on Smith, it has already faced scrutiny due to the constitutionality of the procedure.
The Equal Justice Initiative - a legal advocacy group that has worked on death penalty issues - remarked that 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.
Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, echoed the same sentiment in an interview with Huffington Post, telling the outlet that Alabama "is the very last state that should now experiment using an unprecedented, untested procedure with unknown consequences".
For further context, Smith was one of two hitmen convicted of capital murder for the murder-for-hire killing of a preacher’s wife, Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett.
Prosecutors said he and his friend, John Parker, were paid $1,000 each 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 inmate and 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.
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."
