Supreme Court declines to halt Alabama gas execution, set to take place Thursday – National & International News – WED 24Jan2024

Supreme Court declines to halt Alabama gas execution, set to take place Thursday.

Russia says Ukraine shot down plane carrying 65 of its own POWs.

NATIONAL NEWS

Supreme Court declines to halt Alabama gas execution, set to take place Thursday

The US Supreme Court has declined an appeal from Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Smith to halt his execution with a never-before-tried method, which is set to take place Thursday, Jan. 25. The State plans to put Smith to death using nitrogen hypoxia, a method that is only a legal form of execution in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Smith was convicted in the 1989 murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett. Sennett’s husband ordered the killing and Smith and another man were paid about $1000 each to carry it out. Sennett’s husband killed himself before the case could come to trial. In 1996, a jury recommended a life sentence for Smith, but the judge overruled them and imposed a death sentence.

Smith’s appeal asked the Justices to stay the execution saying it violated the 8th Amendment which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. This is not only is the method untried and its effects unknown, but because it would be the second time in 14 months that Alabama has attempted to put Smith to death. The first time in 2022, the state failed to execute Smith in 2022 using lethal injection. Smith was strapped to a gurney for four hours while workers repeatedly stabbed him with a needle in his arms, wrists, legs and feet in an attempt to find a vein. 

Smith said he has been left with crippling anxiety from that experience and has no confidence the state will get it right this time. Following the botched executions of Smith and another inmate, Alabama Department of Corrections conducted an internal review. They produced a one-and-a-half page report that largely blamed the inmates themselves for the failed execution attempts. ADOC said that by “running out the clock” with appeals for stays of execution, the inmates’ lawyers caused “unnecessary deadline pressure” for their executioners. This, they argued was due to the narrow 24-hour execution warrants. This time, the executioners will have a 30-hour “time frame” to execute Smith beginning on Thursday.

Risk of unnecessary suffering 

Smith’s attorneys have filed a final Hail Mary appeal with the Supreme Court to halt the execution. In this filing, Smith’s attorneys ask for a stay on the grounds that the state had altered its own plan within 48 hours of the execution by changing the time of Smith’s last meal. The time of the meal was altered because of Smith “repeatedly vomiting” recently (a claim Alabama dismissed as “self-reported”). The concern is that Smith could vomit into his nitrogen mask during the execution, causing him to choke and thus increase his suffering. This is just one of myriad concerns raised about the state’s plan to induce nitrogen hypoxia.

Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor in anaesthesiology at Emory University’s School of Medicine pointed to other possibilities for Smith to suffer unnecessarily at the state’s hands. Dr. Zivot contributed to a report submitted to the UN. Last week, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for the execution to be halted on the grounds it “would result in a painful and humiliating death” and thus amount to “torture”. 

Dr. Zivot said Alabama’s assertions about the efficiency and humaneness of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method amounted to “pseudoscience” because there were no medical studies to back it up. “What we do know about nitrogen gas is that in an early study with healthy volunteers, almost all of them at about 15 into 20 seconds of breathing had a generalized seizure,” Dr. Zivot said. This could either cause Smith to lose consciousness or suffer violent spasms. Experts have also warned of a risk of Smith surviving the execution in a vegetative state.

Danger to others present

Dr. Zivot and others have also pointed to a risk that the gas could leak from Smith’s mask and endanger others present. In a BBC interview, Dr. Zivot said:

“I guess I have to conclude that Kenneth Smith must be the worst man in America, because Alabama is so hell bent on killing him, that they’re willing to kill other people to kill him,” Dr Zivot told the BBC.

“Imagine the firing squad where all the witnesses are lined up next to the person you’re about to execute, and you get them all to sign waivers, because it turns out that the guys you’ve got are not very good shots, and so it’s possible that they might shoot you too. So these are some of the things I can imagine that could happen with nitrogen gas,”

ADOC claims to have addressed these concerns with “wall-mounted censors” to indicate when oxygen levels in the chamber are too low. That’s little comfort to Dr. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual advisor, who was asked by the state to sign a waiver acknowledging risks to his safety. Dr. Hood told the BBC:

“I’ll be a number of feet from him, and I have been warned repeatedly by various medical experts that I’m risking my life to do this. If there’s any sort of leak in the hose, if there’s any sort of leak from the mask, from the seal around his face, it could certainly lead to nitrogen leaking into the room,” Dr Hood told the BBC.

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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Russia says Ukraine shot down plane carrying 65 of its own POWs

Earlier today, a Russian Ilyushin Il-76 military transport plane went down in the Belgorod region of Russia, which borders Ukraine. According to Moscow, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war which were to be part of a prisoner swap as well as 9 crew members. There were no survivors.

Ukrainska Pravda, Ukraine’s state-owned media organization, initially published a report citing Ukrainian military sources saying that Ukraine had deliberately shot down the plane. That report was later withdrawn.

Now, Kyiv:

(1) neither confirms nor denies shooting down the plane;

(2) says it considers planes approaching Belgorod legitimate targets because they often carry Russian arms;

(3) claims not to know who or what was on the plane; and

(4) blames Moscow for not warning Kyiv to deconflict the air space before the prisoner swap.

The prisoner swap was negotiated by the United Arab Emirates, with Russia and Ukraine each agreeing to swap 200 prisoners of war. The fate of that deal, is now unclear.

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