A federal judge ruled that Alabama can proceed later this month with the first execution by nitrogen gas asphyxiation, saying that the condemned prisoner was unlikely to show the new method amounts to cruel or unusual punishment.
Kenneth Smith, convicted for a murder-for-hire committed in 1988, is scheduled to be executed in Alabama on Jan. 25 using the method, in which execution officials will bind a mask to his face connected to a cylinder of nitrogen intended to deprive him of oxygen.
U.S. states have found it increasingly difficult to obtain barbiturates used in lethal-injection execution protocols, in part because of a European ban preventing pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs to be used in executions. As a result, some states have sought to revive older methods such as firing squads, while Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma have introduced new gas-based protocols.
United Nations experts warned last week that what would be the first instance anywhere in the world of an execution using inert-gas asphyxiation would likely violate an international treaty against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
