Kenny told me the guards who tried to execute him by lethal injection said it was better than being gassed
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 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 Hitman’s target: Elizabeth Sennett was a pastor’s wife Smith was paid $1,000 to kill 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.
‘Such pain I could hardly breathe’
I’ve witnessed two executions and I have no problem with this killer being put to death in Alabama. But hanging would be swifter and more humane
IN MODERN Britain your view on the death penalty is a test of whether you are a good person. I am, therefore, a bad person. Hundreds of right-thinking people, especially at the BBC, regard me as a monster. For I believe that there are some heinous crimes which are best punished by death.
If (and only if) our courts could be reformed, with proper grown-up juries, unanimous verdicts and judges who took their jobs seriously and stopped obviously unjust trials, I would urge the return of hanging here.
I will not, therefore, be joining any protests against the execution of the Alabama killer Kenneth Smith, who was due to die by nitrogen hypoxia in the deep South state late last night. I am unsure about the method used, as I shall explain. But not about the need to execute.
I hold this opinion reluctantly, but firmly — because I have given it a lot of thought, and because I have looked into the whole issue, over many years. I am persuaded, above all, that the death penalty deters the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals and discourages the use of dangerous violence by them in general. How do we know?
Capital punishment was suspended in this country, in 1948 and 1956, while Parliament debated abolition. modern Leftists will be troubled to know that in 1948 two of Labour’s greatest figures, Clement Attlee and ernest Bevin, voted in Parliament to retain it. during both suspensions, the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals rose. When the suspensions ended, it fell again. It rose again after mPs voted to abolish it in 1965, but of course it did not later fall. The penalty also protects the victims of rapes and robbery, whose attackers might otherwise kill them to get rid of the only witnesses to their crimes.
I believe the excuse most often advanced for refusing to execute — the risk of an innocent person being killed by the state — is an excuse, not a reason.
opponents of the death penalty, as we shall see, are equally happy to get up a protest even when the killing is exceptionally heinous and the evidence is quite beyond doubt. These are often, strikingly, the same people who keenly back the bombing of civilians in the countries chosen for our liberal crusades such as Syria and Libya.
Because I thought I should face the thing I defended, I witnessed two executions while I lived in the U.S., one in Georgia by electric chair ( the British- born killer nicholas Lee Ingram) and one in Texas by lethal injection (of a man called Larry Anderson).
I looked into the crimes of both. Anderson was arrested with his hands covered in blood. After questioning, he told police where to find the body of his victim, Zelda Webster, a bar manager he had first abducted and then robbed.
There were 15 stab wounds to her chest, and marks on her wrists indicating that they had been bound. This crime took place in march 1982. Thanks to repeated appeals, Anderson’s execution did not take place until April 1994.
Ingram’s murder was also extremely cruel. Unusually, we know exactly how cruel it was. In June 1983, he burst into the Georgia home of J.C. and mary Sawyer, terrified them, robbed them, marched them into the woods at gunpoint, tied them to a tree and, after much taunting and threats of torture, shot them both.
But he failed to kill mary, who was able to give unchallengeable evidence of his undoubted guilt. Shortly before Ingram’s April 1995 execution, mary Sawyer said she and her husband ‘begged for mercy and were given none. He was the judge, jury and executioner — all in a matter of minutes. He certainly did not intend for me to live.’
even so, various persons in Britain got up a campaign to have him spared the electric chair.
death penalty opponents do have one good argument. They rightly point out that those states in the U.S. which retain the death penalty do not have significantly lower rates of homicide than those which have abolished it.
There is no great mystery about that. The death penalty only exists in the U.S. as a political gesture by state governments trying to look tough on crime. endless appeals ensure that most convicted murderers die of old age on death row.
For example, Texas suffered 1,322 homicides in 2018. It executed 13 killers that year. most states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never apply it. Louisiana suffers about 500 murders a year. Its last execution was, in fact, in 2010.
Your chances of actually being put to death for a horrible murder in the U.S. are only slightly higher than your chances of being carried off to another galaxy by aliens in the middle of the night. one of the very few exceptions to this was the oklahoma City bomber and masskiller Timothy mcVeigh, but his was a rare case of a Federal execution.
In this country, the argument is put that Britain did not face a huge surge in murders after Parliament ( without seeking the opinion of the voters at a General election) decided to abolish the death penalty in 1965. Well, it is not quite that simple. our homicide statistics are a little hard to read. direct comparisons with the past are difficult. For instance, it is suspected (I can put it no more strongly) that quite a few cases which would once have been tried as murders now end up as manslaughter convictions.
In 1966, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for murder. By 2004, there were 648 homicide convictions — including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22 found to have ‘diminished responsibilities’. This looks like a rise in homicide to me. But it is worse than that.
If this country had the medical services it had in 1965, many victims of violence who nowadays survive would die.
one survey of the crimes of attempted murder and wounding to endanger life (some years ago but still valid) concluded that Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics. many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, within living memory, have been facing capital murder charges, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved.
So think of this as you listen to the pieties of the abolitionists.
As for the Alabama execution: yes, all executions are horrible. Lethal injection, in my view, having seen it done, is an obscene perversion of a medical procedure, and so quite without moral force. The electric chair is shockingly violent, takes far too long and can go horrifically wrong — twice, in
Flames burst from the condemned’s head
We have no idea how long it takes
Florida, flames have burst from the condemned man’s head.
We also have no real idea how long it takes and how much pain the executed feels. I felt several years older after witnessing Ingram’s execution. I will not readily forget either the pathos of his being strapped into the chair by huge guards, or the terrible ‘thwack!’ as the power was switched on and his body jolted against the straps.
The British technique of hanging, though it appears archaic, is probably the swiftest and most humane.
If you do not like it (and who does?), I urge you to consider the real alternative — more lethal violence, more armed crooks, more cruel killings of rape and robbery victims, more knife crime and, of course, more police shootings of suspects, quite without the safeguards of due process.
If civilisation goes unarmed against violent evil, it will not long survive.