Nitrogen gas execution on the cards for Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith

An inmate on death row is about to face a “horror” method of execution never seen before anywhere in the world.

Picture this.

An airtight mask is placed over your nose and mouth.

Colourless, odourless nitrogen gas streams into the mask from a tank similar to those used to inflate helium balloons.

You know you are dying — you are literally suffocating to death.

This is the never-before-tried method an American state has just introduced to execute inmates. And a man named Kenneth Eugene Smith is about to become the first human to ever experience it.

Nitrogen makes up 78 per cent of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with proper levels of oxygen.

But inhalation of pure nitrogen rapidly empties the body of life.

Alarming and inhumane is how one human rights organisation describes the decision by Alabama to execute inmates this way.

“Horror is an understatement,” said Reverend Dr Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser.

“The state of Alabama now has the permission of the federal court to suffocate its citizens.”

The ‘death chamber’ for US inmates.

Brutal crime

Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, will be the first inmate to be executed this way, with the execution slated for January 25.

Mr Smith was one of two men convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett in northwestern Alabama.

Ms Sennett’s pastor husband Charles Sennett, who was having an affair, deeply in debt and wanted to collect an insurance payment, was behind her grisly murder. She was repeatedly stabbed and beaten with a fire extinguisher.

Mr Sennett took his own life a week later.

The other man convicted in the slaying, John Forrest Parker, 42, was executed by lethal injection in June 2010.

Kenneth Eugene Smith.

Smith survived an attempt to execute him by lethal injection in November 2022.

After almost four hours strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility, officials gave up trying to insert an intravenous line into his arm.

Hence the need for an alternative method. Enter, execution by nitrogen gas.

Court rules for ‘experimental’ method

A US District Judge granted the state permission to execute Smith with the “experimental” method this week.

Judge R Austin Huffaker rejected Smith’s request for a preliminary injunction.

His lawyer had argued Alabama was trying to make Smith the “test subject” for an untried execution method.

Elizabeth Sennett

Sennett was a mother of two sons and had numerous grandchildren.

Smith’s lawyer argued the new protocol was riddled with unknowns and potential problems that violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, according to the New York Post.

Judge Huffaker acknowledged it was a new method but noted that lethal injection — now the most common execution method in the country — once was also new.

He said that while Smith had shown theoretical risks of pain and suffering under the state’s protocol, those risks do not rise to an unconstitutional violation.

“Smith is not guaranteed a painless death,” he said.

Smith’s lawyer noted in court filings that the American Veterinary Medical Association wrote in 2020 euthanasia guidelines that nitrogen gas was an acceptable method of euthanasia for pigs but not for other mammals because it could create an “anoxic environment that is distressing for some species”.

Smith’s lawyer also argued that the gas mask, which sits over the nose and mouth, would interfere with Smith’s ability to pray aloud or make a final statement before witnesses in his final moments.

The Alabama prison system agreed to minor changes to settle these concerns.