The application of nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith—a technique never before employed for the death penalty—will not be stopped by the US Supreme Court.
Smith had requested that the court step in, arguing that the execution constituted an unusually harsh penalty.
Thursday is scheduled for the execution, which will include pumping harmful nitrogen into his body through a mask. Two years prior, Alabama attempted to put Smith to death by lethal injection following his 1989 murder conviction.
Judges in the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals may still postpone his scheduled execution while they review a different case that Smith filed. The three-judge panel did not specify when it would render a decision, but it heard arguments last Friday.
Smith’s attorneys used “untested methods” in their appeal filing to the lower court. Smith would experience nitrogen gassing before anyone else in the United States.
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has demanded an end to the novel approach, stating that it may amount to torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
Attempts by Alabama executioners to inject Smith with a deadly mixture of drugs in November 2022 failed.
Before midnight, when the state’s death warrant expired, they were unable to raise a vein. His attorneys claim that the ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment in the constitution prohibits putting guilty people through several attempts at execution.
In 1989, Smith was found guilty alongside another man of killing Elizabeth Sennett, the wife of a preacher, by stabbing and beating her to death in a $1,000 (£786) killing-for-hire.
He acknowledged being there when the victim was killed during his trial, but he maintained that he was not involved in the attack. John Forrest Parker, Smith’s accomplice in crime, was put to death in 2010.
