The state of Alabama, in the United States, is preparing to test a new method of executing a death row inmate on Thursday by asphyxiation with nitrogen. A process about which the United Nations human rights office alerts.
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The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says “alarm” by the new method that the United States is preparing to use for the execution of a death row inmate in Alabama. Kenneth Smith, 58, is to be executed on Thursday, January 25, by nitrogen inhalation.
“Cruel, inhuman, degrading, treatment which could constitute torture under international law” : this is how the United Nations consider this new method which consists of asphyxiating the condemned by depriving him of oxygen, by making him breathe nitrogen using a mask. On January 16, the human rights office asked the authorities of the State of Alabama to suspend the execution of Kenneth Smith. Request refused by the Supreme Court of the United States on Wednesday.
An acceptable method for pigs
The process, authorized in 2018, is supposed to last a quarter of an hour with loss of consciousness in a few seconds. The American Veterinary Medical Association considers it an acceptable method of euthanasia under certain conditions for pigs, but not for other mammals. The Attorney General of Alabama, Republican Steve Marshall, for his part declared in a document that this method was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised.”
Kenneth Smith was convicted in 1988 of murdering the wife of a pastor who wanted to collect his life insurance. He has already been in an execution chamber, in November 2022, but it was impossible at the time to find a vein to inject him with the deadly product, even after 4 hours of looking for one. The last execution by gas dates back to 1999 in the United States. It was with hydrogen cyanide. The Arizona convict was dead after 18 minutes.
American states still carrying out executions face difficulties in obtaining barbiturates used in lethal injections, in particular because of a European ban which prevents pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs intended for use in executions.