Alabama’s nitrogen gas execution and the crueler, vengeful America to come

In a bitterly divided nation, here is one thing Americans can agree on: Kenneth Smith, a 58-year-old Alabama man, is dead. The end for Smith came about three decades after his conviction for the brutal murder-for-hire of a preacher’s wife and about four minutes after Alabama prison officials began pumping deadly nitrogen hypoxia into a mask over Smith’s face, causing the condemned man to gasp for air and shake his gurney before he was finally declared dead.

But the finality of Smith’s sentence was about the only common ground after the first nitrogen gas execution in the history of the world.

To Smith’s spiritual adviser, his wife, and some journalist observers, gassing a human being to death and using him as a guinea pig for an utterly experimental and untested method was both unusual and cruel, brutally so. “This was the fifth execution that I’ve witnessed in Alabama, and I have never seen such a violent reaction to an execution,” Lee Hedgepeth, one of the media witnesses, reported after watching Smith shake and writhe on his death gurney.

“What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life,” agreed the Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s adviser, describing how the executed man was “ripping his head forward over and over and over again.” Hood’s conclusion: “Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward.”

And yet, officials in one of America’s reddest states portrayed this one small step to kill a man as potentially one giant leap for the science of better dying through chemicals — coming soon to a death chamber in your neck of the woods.

“And to my colleagues across the country, many of which were watching last night — Alabama has done it,” the state’s GOP attorney general, Steve Marshall, proclaimed at a news conference. “And now so can you. And we stand ready to assist you in implementing this method in your states.” Indeed, Oklahoma and Mississippi have already signed up for America’s first new method of state-sponsored killing since lethal injection, four decades ago.

There is so much irony and injustice surrounding America’s latest embrace of the death penalty. Start with the simple fact that Smith should never have been executed in the first place. There’s no argument his 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett — at the behest of her minister husband who died by suicide as the plot unraveled — was a despicable act. If you morally oppose capital punishment, as I do, then it’s fair to think Smith should have spent life behind bars. But so did 11 of Smith’s 12 jurors in an ultraconservative state, only to be overruled by a hanging judge. Since then, the way Smith was sentenced to die has been found unconstitutional.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution also bars “cruel and unusual punishment” — which inarguably is what happened to Smith the first time Alabama tried to kill him in 2022, by lethal injection. That November, state prison officials spent four agonizing hours poking the convicted killer with needles in his arms and legs and eventually near his heart, trying and failing to find a vein for the lethal chemicals. The botched execution left Smith both ill and traumatized.

Is the first-ever use of nitrogen gas really more humane? The Montgomery Advertiser noted that “the American Veterinary Medical Association disallows the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a form of euthanasia for mammals, other than pigs, because it causes an ‘anoxic environment that is distressing for some species.’” Offer not valid in Alabama, Mississippi, or Oklahoma, apparently,

It’s tempting, and understandably so, to view the killing of Smith only through the prism of how one feels about the death penalty. I’ve opposed capital punishment since I was a little boy who learned in Sunday school that killing another human being was a sin, and who struggled to understand the moral contradiction of the electric chair. That faith has only strengthened as an adult, after coming to understand that scores of people in this country have been wrongly convicted and sometimes sentenced to die at the hands of corrupt cops and prosecutors.

In this case, Smith’s guilt was not in doubt. Much less certain is what was accomplished by putting him to death. Even Sennett’s relatives, who forgave Smith for his crime, had their doubts. “Nothing that happened here today is going to bring Mom back,” the victim’s son, Mike Sennett, said. “It’s a bittersweet day, we’re not going to be jumping around, hooping and hollering, hooraying and all that, that’s not us. We’re glad this day is over.”

That didn’t stop cruelty-is-the-point politicians like Alabama’s attorney general, Marshall, from strutting across the stage like peacocks. I think a nation’s stance on capital punishment is a pretty good barometer of its broader moral climate. More than two-thirds of the world’s countries do not have capital punishment, but the United States was No. 5 in the world in 2022, trailing only a rogues’ gallery of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. It’s a shameful list to be on.

» READ MORE: The cruelty is the point as AG Barr, Trump return to death penalty barbarism | Will Bunch

This weekend, the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, renewing our shaky vows to never again witness an atrocity like the mass murder of six million Jews during World War II. Those war crimes were aided by a German chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben, which supplied the Nazi regime with the poison gas used in Adolf Hitler’s death chamber, Zyklon B. It seemed a strange moment for Alabama to boast about its new way of chemical death, even if it was just one person.

Because does it ever stop at just one person?

Because Smith’s nitrogen execution did not happen in a vacuum, but at a moment when growing numbers of American citizens seem angry to the point of irrationality, with many pledging fealty to a would-be dictator whose only substantive campaign promise is to be their “retribution.”

At the very moment that Alabama’s prisoner was writhing on his death gurney, the governor in the simpatico state of Texas and his $10 billion army of tin soldiers were busy sharpening and laying down more razor wire across the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, so that desperate mother-and-child refugees lucky enough not to drown in the frigid January currents will feel the cruel and unusual slashing of hard metal before they can seek asylum on U.S. soil.

The knifepoint of American cruelty could only grow sharper in the second half of the 2020s. A Donald Trump 47 presidency hell-bent on retribution is already promising mass deportations of millions of undocumented migrants, a policy that would come with large detention camps, dead-of-night immigration raids, and other human rights abuses. Team Trump is openly enthusing about deploying troops against protesters or in Democratic-run big cities and prosecuting the would-be president’s political enemies. In this climate, a new advance in death chamber technology is a feature, not a bug.

It’s hard to believe that in the 1960s and ‘70s — those same years I was learning about the Lord’s Sixth Commandment in Sunday school — America looked to be on the brink of abolishing the death penalty. By the end of the 1970s, a nation awash in crime paranoia and Charles Bronson vigilante movies rediscovered revenge and hasn’t looked back. America’s start-up culture in finding new science for state-sanctioned death was not real justice in the case of Kenneth Smith, but an indictment of a seriously ailing society. May God have mercy on our souls.

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