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The state of Alabama has a new online system to automatically notify crime victims when a state inmate has a parole date or is being released from prison.
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North Carolina has joined Alabama and Mississippi to improve outcomes for more prisoners who return to society through an approach focused on education, health care and housing.
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Inmates in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands. A hidden path to America's dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country's largest maximum-security prison. Alabama Public Radio’s national award-winning series “No Stone Unturned: Preserving Slave Cemeteries in Alabama” aired just as voters headed to the polls in 2023 to remove slavery from the State Constitution. Much of that labor, it was observed, happened among prison inmates.
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The European Union and the U.N. Human Rights Office are expressing regret over the death of convicted killer Kenneth Smith. The EU called the first ever use of nitrogen gas "particularly cruel." The U.N. says the death penalty does not deter crime. APR news may be asked to explain to news listeners in eastern Europe how Alabama administers capitol punishment. The investigative news website "Dnevnik" in Bulgaria’s capitol city of Sofia contacted APR and asked for our input.
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An Alabama inmate remains scheduled to be the first person in the United States to be put to death with nitrogen gas. The U.S. Supreme Court is rejecting a request for a stay of execution for Kenneth Eugene Smith. Prior to this decision, his attorneys were hoping for a last-minute reprieve from federal courts in his bid to halt the death sentence from being carried out.
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Alabama is just over a day away from the first ever execution using nitrogen gas. Kenneth Eugene Smith is on death row for the murder for hire of a preacher’s wife in 1988. The State wants to use a face mask on the inmate to pump in nitrogen until he dies of suffocation. Alabama claims the process is painless. The non-profit, non-partisan, criminal justice journalism organization The Marshall Project calls it experimental.
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Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen needed to stay alive, on Thursday in the nation's first execution attempt with the method.
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Attorneys for the first inmate slated to be put to death with nitrogen gas have asked a federal appeals court to block the execution scheduled later this month in Alabama. Kenneth Eugene Smith's attorneys on Monday asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to block his January 25th execution. The appellate court will hear arguments in the case on Friday.
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The Alabama Supreme Court rejected the appeal of a death row inmate who is scheduled to be the first person put to death with nitrogen gas and had argued that he shouldn't face execution after a previous attempt at a lethal injection failed.
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A federal judge is considering diverging arguments about the humaneness and risks of execution by nitrogen gas as he weighs whether to let Alabama attempt the nation's first use of the method.