Alabama carries out the first execution with nitrogen gas of a prisoner sentenced to death in the US

MADRID, 26 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The authorities of the US state of Alabama carried out this Thursday the first known execution with nitrogen gas of a prisoner sentenced to death in the United States, after the country's Supreme Court refused to intervene in this case.

The execution took place at the William Holman Correctional Center in Atmore, around 8:25 p.m. (local time), after the prisoner, Kenneth Smith, had already survived a failed lethal injection in November 2022, the television network reports. American CBS.

Minutes earlier, the court once again rejected an appeal presented by the convicted man's lawyers, thus clearing the way for the state authorities. This type of application of the death sentence has been criticized by experts as experimental and, potentially, unnecessarily painful and dangerous for the convicted person and those present in the room.

Smith, who has spent three decades on death row, was convicted in 1988 of the murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett, whose husband -- Charles Sennett -- hired several men to kill his wife and make it appear that she had died. in a robbery. The husband committed suicide a week later, when the investigations were focusing on him. Smith was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Alabama is one of three states in the United States that allows nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative to lethal injection and other traditional methods of capital punishment. Oklahoma and Mississippi are the other states that have authorized this type of capital punishment, although until now none of them had been used.

The UN Office for Human Rights assured last week in a statement that there are "serious" doubts about whether this execution, in these circumstances, could incur "torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments."