Alabama’s Kenneth Smith’s execution ‘could amount to torture’, says UN human rights chief

(CNN) — Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Smith may be executed using nitrogen gas, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Friday.

“I deeply regret the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama, despite serious concerns that this novel and untested method of asphyxiation with nitrogen gas may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” Turk said.

Turk said the death penalty was “incompatible with the fundamental right to life” and urged all states to implement a moratorium on its use “as a step towards its universal abolition”.

On Thursday night, Smith became the first death row inmate in the United States to be executed by asphyxiation with nitrogen gas. The inmate was sentenced to death in 1988 for his role in a murder-for-hire, but survived the state’s initial attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2022. The US Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a last-minute appeal to stay Smith’s execution.

The European Union (EU) also said in a statement on Friday that the new method of execution was “particularly cruel and unusual punishment.”

European Union spokesman Peter Steno said the bloc “deeply regrets” Smith’s execution, adding that it strongly opposes the death penalty “at all times and in all circumstances”. A spokesman described capital punishment as “a violation of the right to life and the ultimate denial of human dignity”.

Steno reiterated the EU’s continued calls for the universal abolition of the death penalty, adding that the bloc welcomes the fact that 29 US states have abolished or suspended the death penalty.

Nitrogen hypoxia, a mechanism about which little is known

Little was known about how the established method of execution, known as nitrogen hypoxia, was carried out because the protocol published by Alabama redacted parts that experts say shielded key details from public scrutiny. The state, in court records, said the edits were made to maintain safety and that it believes death by nitrogen gas is “probably the most humane method of execution ever.”

Smith and his team were skeptical. “The eyes of the world are upon this impending moral apocalypse,” Smith and Rev. Jeff Hood, his spiritual adviser, said in a joint statement Thursday afternoon. “Our prayer is that people don’t look the other way. We can’t normalize each other’s suffocation.”

“This is a protocol that was created out of nothing,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which criticizes but does not condone how the death penalty is administered in the United States. position on it.

“There is no precedent for this,” he told CNN. “There is no evidence of this process. No one knows how it will happen.”

While some US states used lethal gas to execute prisoners decades ago, the use of nitrogen would be new: in theory, it would involve replacing 100% of the air a prisoner breathes with nitrogen, depriving him of the oxygen he needs to survive. According to proponents of the method, citing nitrogen’s role in fatal industrial accidents or suicides, such displacement would lead to a painless death.

The origin of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method is found in most sources in a 1995 article. National ReviewAccording to Deborah Dano, a professor at Fordham Law School who has studied the death penalty for decades, it has been on the rise in recent years as states struggle to implement lethal injection.

Since its inception 40 years ago, lethal injection has become the most prominent method of execution for the United States government and the 27 states that still carry out the death penalty. But starting in 2009, states began to lose access to the drugs used to drive it for a long time, leading to the use of alternative drugs that “increased the problems of lethal injection,” he said. Give it to CNN.

With reporting by CNN’s Dakin Andon, Isabelle Rosales and Christina Maxouris