Kenny told me the guards who tried to execute him by lethal injection said it was better than being gassed
As murderer who survived one execution faces a second – with untried method vets refuse to use on animals
IT’S now two months since I spoke to Kenneth Smith, the Death Row inmate who – by the time you read this – may well have breathed his last.
He told me then that he was ‘absolutely terrified’ at the prospect. Hardly surprising, you might say, but ‘Kenny’ – as he is known to the staff who have been his jailers for the past 35 years – had a very particular reason to dread his final moments.
In November 2022, after three men spent 90 minutes trying to kill him with a cocktail of drugs before giving up after failing to raise a vein, one of his would-be executioners attempted to give him solace by reassuring him lethal injection was a much better way to go than being gassed.
‘He was trying to comfort me and we got into this bizarre conversation,’ Smith, 58, said. ‘He said: “Oh, you know, man, if you got to go, this is the way to go.” Lethal
‘Such pain I could hardly breathe’
injection, he said, is painless. And he said that gas is suffocation and that nobody knows what is going to happen. I’ve not been able to get that out of my head.’
But, just a week later, the state of Alabama announced it would seek to kill Smith in this way, setting him on a bleak path to becoming the first person in the US to be executed by a new, untested gassing method known as ‘nitrogen hypoxia’.
This involves fitting the victim with a face mask and making them breathe pure nitrogen until they suffocate.
Alabama has hailed it as ‘the most painless and humane method of execution known to man’ and claim it should take a few seconds to knock Smith unconscious and five to 15 minutes to kill him.
Several states which still enforce capital punishment list nitrogen hypoxia as a permissable execution method but have never used it. They and Alabama will be observing Smith’s fate as they seek an alternative to lethal injections.
But opponents of execution, including the UN, have said the method amounts to human experimentation as no one can know whether this process – sometimes used to kill pigs but banned by vets as a method of putting down other mammals – is painless.
Some medical experts think it could result in a range of catastrophic mishaps, from violent convulsions to survival in a vegetative state. Smith’s lawyers claimed the method would breach the US Constitution’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and launched a last-minute appeal. But on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court and a lower appeals court declined to block the execution. Amid final efforts to save him, a 30-hour window in which to execute Smith with nitrogen was due to expire at 6am local time today (noon GMT).
Smith is imprisoned in the William C Holman Correctional Facility. The father-of-four was convicted of the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett, 45, in Sheffield, Alabama. He and another man, John Parker, were paid $1,000 each by her husband Charles, a local church pastor who was having an affair with another woman, to kill his wife so he could collect the insurance money. Smith admitted he took part in her assault but denied intending to murder her.
After decades of legal wrangling he was scheduled to be executed on November 17, 2022. Smith spent much of that day with his family and friends in Holman’s visitation area as his lawyers launched 11th-hour legal appeals.
He had a last meal – his choice of fried catfish and shrimp – before being visited one last time by a local lay minister. Just before 8pm, guards swarmed into his ‘death cell’ and walked him to the nearby execution chamber, although legal discussions were ongoing.
He was then strapped to a gurney by his arms, legs and feet. At 10pm – 23 minutes before the Supreme Court approved his execution – three men wearing blue, red and green sets of scrubs, entered with a medical trolley.
They injected him with midazolam hydrochloride, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which would theoretically sedate him and then stop his heart.
‘Blue Scrubs’ and ‘Green Scrubs’ both failed to find a usable vein, and the executioners asked for the gurney to be tilted so his feet were pointing upwards. Everyone but his guards exited, leaving Smith like that for several minutes.
When the IV team returned, ‘Red Scrubs’ plunged a huge needle under Smith’s collarbone. Smith recalls being repeatedly jabbed with the needle causing such pain he could ‘hardly breathe’.
He has since compared the experience to being put through a sewing machine. He told the Mail: ‘By the end of it, I wasn’t thinking about prayer – I was thinking, “Please get that out of my chest”.’
But eventually they stopped and again everyone but the guards left, leaving Smith strapped to the gurney. He didn’t know they’d run out of time to carry out the death warrant before a midnight deadline.
Now his ordeal was over, the IV team’s demeanour changed: Green Scrubs offered him some water and, holding his hand, told him he would be praying for him.
Why had he survived, he asked. ‘Legal stuff,’ said Green Scrubs, who then made his extraordinary assurance about the merits of lethal injection over nitrogen.
The identity and qualifications of the would-be executioners have never been revealed, though senior officials insisted some present had ‘medical’ training.
When we spoke on the first anniversary of his bungled execution, he told me: ‘Those guards who carried me around... I’ve seen them every single day, Tom.’
Given nitrogen hypoxia’s potential to transform America’s beleaguered capital punishment system, Kenneth Smith will be far from alone in discovering whether his fate is painless or excruciating.