Kenneth Eugene Smith died on January 25, 2024. According to Alabama court records, he was guilty of killing Elizabeth Sennett. He and two other men were convicted of stabbing and beating Ms. Sennett to death at the behest of her husband, Charles Sennett. The ‘Reverend’ Charles Sennett committed suicide when he realized that he was a prime suspect in the murder. Kenneth Smith was executed using nitrogen gas. He was strapped to a gurney and fitted with a mask attached to a cannister of pure nitrogen. There was no oxygen in the gas he was given, and he died of ‘asphyxia.’ This was the first time this method was used in a state execution, although innumerable murders and suicides over the past few centuries have relied on the same principles to kill people.
Humans need oxygen to survive. Any method that deprives them of oxygen [causing hypoxia] will kill them. This can be achieved without the administration of a tightly fitting mask and a cannister of nitrogen gas by placing a pillow firmly over the victim’s face or wrapping a plastic bag over his or her face until he or she stops breathing. Using a mask and a nitrogen cannister adds a scientific air to the proceedings, but the effect is the same.
Hypoxia causes numerous troubling phenomena, including nausea, vomiting, confusion, and convulsions. Execution by oxygen deprivation has never been judged consistent with the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The execution of Mr. Smith using this method has raised several old and some new issues.
Elizabeth Sennett’s murder was more than 35 years ago. Mr. Smith was convicted of her murder in 1988 and sent to death row more than three decades ago. Alabama tried to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, but the ‘executioners’ could not find a vein suitable for injecting lethal drugs before the warrant for the execution expired. They tried to get the job done over the course of four hours. The decades he spent awaiting the execution of his sentence made a mockery of the dictum, “Justice delayed is justice denied,” and the time spent in a failed attempt to kill him met the standard for psychological torture.
The State of Alabama ordered and completed the killing of Mr. Smith for his alleged role in the murder of one woman. Other states require extraordinary circumstances, such as serial murders and killing in the commission of another heinous crime, such as rape, to justify the death penalty. Some states, including Connecticut, simply refuse to execute people, regardless of the enormity of the crime. Given the severity and irreversibility of the death penalty, we might expect uniformity in its application throughout the United States. Obviously, that is not and never has been the case. Even the methods adopted to carry out that sentence in jurisdictions where it is permitted vary considerably. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment but provides no guidance regarding what warrants the death penalty and what constitutes a ‘good death.’
The states practicing capital punishment [the death penalty] have used hanging, shooting, electrocution, cyanide gas and lethal injection to achieve the desired result. That any of these do not qualify as ‘cruel’ is debatable. Sigmund Freud, an authority on mental distress, committed suicide by self-injecting 100 milligrams of morphine sulphate. [He suffered horribly from palatal cancer for which he had unsatisfactory surgery.] Based on his personal experience with drugs, Dr. Freud expected this modus mortis to be fast, painless, and tidy. He was obviously unable to write about his experience with this method, but several states followed his lead in recent decades and adopted injections with anesthetic agents, paralyzing drugs, and cardiac arrest inducing chemicals to avoid any suggestion of cruel or unusual punishment. Their ‘good intentions’ have often been frustrated by their inability to get the desired agents from distributors who either object to killing by lethal injection or who want to avoid litigation based upon their participation in an activity intended to cause death.
That bias and racial prejudice have often contributed to guilty verdicts in murder cases has long been established. That wrongful convictions in murder cases have occasionally been demonstrated with techniques or evidence only available after the jury verdict sentenced the accused to death has also featured more prominently in recent years. We are naturally inclined to see the death penalty as a deterrent, but the experience in states with executions compared to the experience in states without capital punishment does not support this presumption. In recent years, Mississippi and Louisiana have had annual murder rates exceeding 20 per 100,000 citizens. These two states have the highest per capita murder rates in the United States despite having capital punishment as an option. New York State had fewer than 5 murders per 100,000 during the same interval, despite having no death penalty for any crimes since 2004.
Many argue that executions provide “closure” for the victims’ friends and family. Unfortunately, the grief caused by a murder is not so easily resolved. Even the thirst for revenge is rarely slaked by the execution of an accused killer. The pain and anger with the loss of a loved one remains an open wound, regardless of the punishment meted out to the presumed perpetrator. Commonsense suggests that the most awful crimes warrant the most awful punishments, but modern societies have increasingly turned away from the most barbaric responses to horrible acts. We no longer consider limb amputations, blinding, stoning, burning at the stake, ‘drawing and quartering,’ and other such punishments reasonable, even though they were widely applied in numerous societies in the past.
The rationale behind these barbaric practices was that they would deter even the most desperate people from committing crimes. The threat of these punishments failed to achieve the desired result. Similarly, killing murderers, even when the correct perpetrator has been identified, has not proved to be a deterrent for those disposed to commit the crime or a comfort for those impacted by the commission of the crime. Killing murderers is hypothetically satisfying, but in practice, it accomplishes nothing useful or praiseworthy. It is time to discard capital punishment as an option, even if the method adopted does not strike us as ‘cruel or unusual.’
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
