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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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Alabama is preparing to use a new method of execution: nitrogen gas. Kenneth Eugene Smith, who survived the state's previous attempt to put him to death by lethal injection in 2022, is scheduled to be put to death Thursday by nitrogen hypoxia. If carried out, it would the first new method of execution since lethal injection was introduced in 1982.
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On Monday, January 22, a delegation of Alabama faith leaders and community members will gather at the state capitol building to urge Governor Kay Ivey to pause the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution. Kenneth Smith is set to be executed by this new and experimental method on January 25.
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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 says Alabama can carry out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas despite claims the method is cruel and untested. U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker refused on Wednesday to block the scheduled Jan. 25 execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen hypoxia.
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A Nebraska lawmaker has introduced a bill to add asphyxiation by nitrogen to the state's method of carrying out the death penalty, even as Alabama officials await a judge's ruling on a request to block its plans to become the nation's first state to carry out an execution by nitrogen gas.
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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.
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A lawsuit filed by lawyers for a spiritual adviser to an Alabama inmate scheduled to be executed with nitrogen gas next month say that restrictions on how close the adviser can get to the inmate in the death chamber are “hostile to religion.”