Alabama‘s Attorney General has vowed to keep using nitrogen gas to execute inmates despite harrowing reports from witnesses to Kenneth Eugene Smith’s execution.
Steve Marshall even offered to assist other states in procuring the previously-untested method, brushing off claims the killer writhed and shook in agony as he was slowly suffocated to death in a 22-minute ordeal on Thursday night.
‘What occurred last night was textbook,’ Marshall said Friday, contrasting allegations from many, including Smith’s spiritual advisor who said it was ‘torture’ and the ‘worst thing’ he had ever seen.
‘When they turned the nitrogen on, he began to convulse, he popped up on the gurney over and over again, he shook the whole gurney,’ spiritual advisor Jeff Hood, who was in the chamber, said immediately after the execution.
In the face of the controversy, nitrogen hypoxia has opened a new avenue for US prisons to continue the practice of executions, with some states going years without amid a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs.
Marshall cited this in his remarks Friday, praising how nitrogen gas executions are ‘no longer an untested method – it is a proven one.’
Officials insisted for months leading up to the execution that it would be humane and painless for Smith, who had a previous execution in 2022 called off after prison staff tried and failed to insert an IV line for several painful hours.
Following the failed execution in 2022, Smith sought his subsequent execution to be carried out via nitrogen hypoxia – in an apparent gamble that officials wouldn’t follow through with the untested method.
However, Marshall said of the 165 inmates on Alabama’s death row, 43 prisoners have opted to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia over lethal injection when their time comes.
‘We’ll definitely have more nitrogen hypoxia executions in Alabama,’ he concluded.
Hellbound and Down 