Back in 2011, the European Union barred the export of sodium thiopental and other drugs used in lethal injections on the grounds that the death penalty is repugnant and they want the US to stop doing it. Manufacturers such as Pfizer followed suit, making the three-drug cocktail formerly used to end the lives of people sentenced to death for crimes they may or may not have committed practically impossible to get. Doctors won’t participate either, as nearly all medical associations deem the practice unethical — leaving IV insertion to untrained hands.
While all of this has certainly slowed down the number of executions in the US, it hasn’t stopped it entirely. Instead, many states have tried other lethal injection cocktails, leading to a surge in executions going terribly, terribly, horrifically wrong. In 2022, more than a third of attempted executions were botched — including Alabama’s attempted execution of one Kenneth Eugene Smith, convicted of murder-for-hire in 1996, in which a bunch of Definitely Not Medical Professionals spent hours and hours trying and failing to properly insert an IV while Smith was strapped to a gurney.
But Alabama has not given up on trying to kill Kenneth Smith, even though the only reason he is facing the death penalty is because of a judicial override of the jury’s recommendation that he receive life without parole, a practice outlawed in the state in 2017.
Rather, they plan to try to kill him on January 25 by asphyxiating him with nitrogen hypoxia, something which has never been attempted before in Alabama or any other state — at least on humans. It was once used to put animals to sleep, but was later deemed too “unacceptable” by the American Veterinary Medical Association due to its tendency to produce panic, distress and seizures in non-avian animals (like humans).
While such death penalty enthusiasts as Alabama Governor Kay Ivey are very excited to give the cruel and unusual new method a go, non-sadists are less enthusiastic. Experts from the United Nations issued a statement last week warning the state not to go through with it.
Via United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:
The recently approved ‘Executions’ Protocol’ of the State of Alabama, allows for the use of nitrogen gas asphyxiation. “We are concerned that nitrogen hypoxia would result in a painful and humiliating death,” the experts said. They warned that experimental executions by gas asphyxiation – such as nitrogen hypoxia – will likely violate the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
They expressed regret about the continuation of executions in the US, which contradict global trends towards the abolition of the death penalty. Botched executions, lack of transparency of execution protocols and the use of untested drugs to execute prisoners in the US have continuously drawn the attention of the UN mechanisms, including special procedures.
The experts noted that punishments that cause severe pain or suffering, beyond harms inherent in lawful sanctions likely violate the Convention against Torture to which the United States is a party, and the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment that guarantees that no detainee shall be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation which may be detrimental to his health.
Surely, we would all love to believe this would mean something, but it’s hardly as if the US has not run afoul of the UN Human Rights commission before when it comes to imprisoning or torturing people before. In fact, it would almost appear that those in charge of our prison system specifically used the UN’s Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) as a guide for what not to do.
The UN experts have appealed to both the United States and the state of Alabama to halt this execution pending review of this method, but that seems relatively unlikely to happen, because America/Alabama.
PREVIOUSLY:
This is going to involve an actual gas chamber. Is it OK to call these people Nazis now?
My late brother and I agreed on most things but were diametrically opposed on the death penalty. He said if someone were to kill me, he'd want them to die and I spent HOURS of our lives in this debate telling him that if I were murdered I would expect him to represent me in court and demand that the death penalty be off the table. He categorically refused, which I found horrifying. All my arguments about justice needing to be cold and clinical not hot and revenge based, the barbarity of it, that life in prison more than satisfies the need to keep society safe, and the tendency to be applied disproportionately to POC and the poor, and the fact that if exculpatory evidence is found later, there is no recourse- person be dead....fell on deaf ears. Unfortunately a lot of people are really into the Biblical "eye for an eye" and not Gandhi's more appropriate understanding.