The UN demanded on Tuesday that the US state of Alabama renounce its intentions to kill a man by nitrogen gas suffocation, citing it as a “untested” practice that may be tantamount to torture.
January 25 is Kenneth Eugene Smith’s scheduled execution date. Smith has been on death row for more than thirty years and was the subject of an earlier attempt at execution.
Although lethal injection has been the main method of carrying out the death penalty in recent years, Alabama has announced that Smith will be executed using nitrogen gas.
“We are alarmed by the imminent execution… through the use of a novel and untested method: suffocation by nitrogen gas,” UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
The method, which she said had to her knowledge never been used anywhere in the world, “could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, under international human rights law”, Shamdasani warned.
The UN rights office, she said, “calls on Alabama state authorities to halt Smith’s execution… and to refrain from taking steps towards any other executions in this manner”.
She voiced concern that the US states of Mississippi and Oklahoma had also recently approved the new execution method.
While nitrogen gas has never been used to execute humans in the United States, it is sometimes used to kill animals.
But Shamdasani pointed out that the American Veterinary Medical Association recommends giving even large animals a sedative when being euthanised in this manner, while Alabama’s protocol for execution by nitrogen asphyxiation makes no provision for the sedation of human beings prior to execution.
Smith, 58, was convicted of a 1988 murder for hire, and eventually sentenced to death.
He was subjected to a failed execution attempt in 2022, when execution officials were unable to set intravenous lines for the lethal injection drugs within the required timeframe.
“They spent more than an hour trying and failed. It was a botched execution,” Shamdasani said.After that dire experience Smith was now facing “this very untested method, which could amount to torture”.
She also highlighted that Smith had ongoing proceedings in a federal court against the looming execution, which have yet to be resolved.Beyond the execution method, Shamdasani reiterated the UN’s opposition to the death penalty in principle.
“The death penalty is inconsistent with the fundamental right to life,” she said.
“Rather than inventing new ways to implement capital punishment, we urge all states to put in place a moratorium on its use, as a step towards universal abolition.”
