GENEVA (Reuters) – United Nations (UN) experts on Wednesday called on American authorities not to carry out the planned execution of a detainee by nitrogen hypoxia, saying that this method could subject him to “treatment cruel, inhuman or degrading, or even torture.”
This type of execution involves making the inmate breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving him of oxygen, which leads to death.
Kenneth Smith, convicted of a murder to order committed in 1988, is sentenced to be executed in the US state of Alabama on January 25 via this procedure.
The 58-year-old is one of only two people alive in the United States to have survived an initial execution attempt in Alamaba in November 2022, when several attempts to insert an intravenous line failed.
“This will be the first attempt at execution by nitrogen hypoxia,” four UN special rapporteurs said in a statement. They say the method could cause “serious suffering” and likely contradict the ban on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
“We fear that nitrogen hypoxia could lead to a painful and humiliating death.”
Kenneth Smith’s lawyers said the untested gassing protocol could violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” They say attempting the execution a second time, regardless of the method, is unconstitutional.
Most executions in the United States are carried out using lethal doses of a barbiturate, but some states have had difficulty obtaining these drugs due to a European Union law banning pharmaceutical companies from sell drugs to prisons that could be used in executions.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; French version by Gaëlle Sheehan, edited by Kate Entringer)
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